The NIE, generally speaking

In the “Franks on the absence of WMD” post, I took issue with General Franks’s view that every indication before the war was that Iraq had weaponized WMD, and I listed numerous reports and opinions that raised objections and contrary views. I will discuss each of those, and I am going to start with a general examination of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE. This was the primary document upon which the Bush administration based its case that Saddam had WMD and had to be taken out via military force. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report basically trashed the NIE, saying that “Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting.” Even so, the NIE shows that it contained numerous caveats, qualifiers, and dissenting opinions.

There is also something the NIE did not say. In a speech at Georgetown University on February 5, 2004, CIA Director George Tenet pointed out that the NIE never said Iraq was an “imminent threat.” That certainly is not what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. were saying both before and after the NIE, but that is a subject for a different time. Right now, I am pointing out that, contrary to General Franks’s view, there were signs that Iraq did not possess weaponized WMD. The fact that the NIE did not say Iraq was an imminent threat is one such sign.

Moreover, the NIE did contain language that should have caused at least a pause for thought. Tenet said in his Georgetown speech that “analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs and those debates were spelled out in the Estimate.” Well, that depends on which version of the NIE he was talking about. Much of the media coverage of these “debates” focused on the fact that there were two versions of the NIE–the 90-page classified version and the 25-page version that was released to the public. The 90-page version went to the White House, senior administration officials, and Congress. Last summer, some media started noting differences between the “key judgments” as stated in the 25-page version and other intelligence reports, and that led to the White House declassifying excerpts from the 90-page version on July 18, 2003. As noted in WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in January 2004, the excerpts from the classified version of the NIE “contained forty distinct caveats or conditions on the intelligence judgments—including fifteen uses of the adverb “probably”—that other publications and statements usually dropped.” Jonathan S. Landay, a reporter for Knight-Ridder News Service, added in a February 10, 2004, article that the classified version contained caveats such as “we judge that,” “we assess that,” and “we lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD programs.” Landay wrote that “These phrases, according to current and former intelligence officials, long have been used in intelligence reports to stress an absence of hard information and underscore that judgments are extrapolations or estimates.” So, the version of the NIE that went to Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, etc., contained language which showed that NOT all indications and signs were that Iraq had weaponized WMD.

The differences between the 90-page version of the NIE on the one hand and the 25-page version and public statements by Bush and other senior officials on the other are rather stark. However, they are better left to a separate discussion. Right now, I wish to focus on what information was actually available to the decision makers (as opposed to the public) prior to the war. The caveats, qualifiers, and dissenting views in the NIE comprise one segment of that information. Some of the reports I mentioned in the “Franks on the absence of WMD” post are addressed in the NIE, but a detailed discussion of those reports will be done in subsequent posts, beginning with the Air Force’s view on Iraq’s unmanned aerial vehicles.