A closer look at the NIE

Some further questions about the NIE were raised in the comments to the previous post, and I will attempt to address them in this post.

Question 1: Which version of the NIE did Congress see, the 90 or 25 pager?

When I first wrote about the NIE, I wrote that Congress got the 90-page version. At that time I thought that meant that the entire Congress got the full NIE. However, once I started looking into this yesterday, doubts arose, and I have yet to find a simple, definitive answer. Apparently, the entirety of the 90-page version is still classified, which seems odd if indeed the 90-page version was given to the entire Congress. Also, the rules of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (specifically Rule 9) generally do not allow classified testimony or material to be disclosed to anyone not a member of the committee. The Rules for the House Intelligence Committee were not available on the Committee's website. In any event, the general rule is that classified material does not go beyond the Senate Committee, and that would indicate that the 90-page version of the NIE did not go to the full Congress. Still, I seem to remember that the 90-page version was made available for review to all members of Congress.

If anyone has the simple, definitive answer, please clue me in.

Question 2: If those who wrote the report and knew the truth was not being presented, why didn't they speak up?

Now this is the really important question. Unfortunately, I once again do not have a definitive answer. However, based largely on the facts found by the Senate Intelligence Committee in its July 7, 2004, report I will present some possible answers.

Before presenting those possible answers, however, I am go to raise more questions. Question 2 could be asked of the 90-page NIE and the 25-page version separately, and that is what I will do.

• Question 2 and the 90-page NIE
  

Let's revisit the November 20, 2005, Washington Post editorial by former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham, wherein he described how the NIE came to be written:

At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared.

(emphasis added). Un-freaking-believable. The Bush administration had been talking increasingly about possible action against Iraq for most of 2002, and yet there had been no request for an Iraq NIE. This fact is all the more amazing given that Graham also described how in February 2002 Gen. Tommy Franks told him that the war effort in Afghanistan was being compromised because resiurces were being taken away to prepare for a war in Iraq.

As stated in the Senate Intelligence Committee's report,

A National Intelligence Estimate is the IC's [Intelligence Community's] most authoritative written judgment concerning a specific national security issue. The Estimates are intended to provide policymakers in both the executive and legislative branches with the best, unvarnished, and unbiased information - regardless of whether analytic judgments conform to any particular policy objective.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that when one is contemplating going to war, a National Intelligence Estimate is absolutely necessary. And yet none had been requested by the White House. The NIE for Iraq was done only because four of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded it (and they were authorized to do so) after Tenet's September appearance. Sen. Durbin wrote a letter to Tenet on September 9, 2002. Graham wrote his letter to Tenet on September 10, 2002. On September 13, 2002, Sen. Feinstein wrote a letter to Bush requesting his assistance in the preparation of the NIE. And Sen. Levin sent a letter to Tenet on September 17, 2002. Remember those dates.

As described in the Senate Intelligence Committe's report, the Iraq NIE was put on a fast track of 2-3 weeks in spite of the facts that 1) completing an NIE in 60 days would be considered fast, and 2) NIEs typically take 3-6 months to complete.

The foregoing facts start to paint a more complete picture when one other fact is added. According to the legislative history, the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq, a/k/a the Iraq War Resolution, was first introduced in Congress on September 19, 2002. So, just days after it was revealed that no NIE on Iraq had even been requested, and days after four Senators called for an Iraq NIE, the Iraq War Resolution was introduced in Congress. What this means is that the Bush administration, aided by members of Congress, rushed to get a Congressional resolution that would give Bush the blessing to wage war. However, given that an NIE had been requested, it was not feasible to get a vote on the resolution until the NIE was done.

The 90-page NIE was delivered on October 1, 2002, the 25-page version came on October 4, the House passed the Resolution on October 10, and it passed the Senate on September 11.

So, the NIE had to be a rush job, and even if members of Congress wanted to look it over in any detail, there was not enough time for all members to do so.

And do not forget the portion of Graham's editorial quoted in the previous post which showed that none of the information in the 90-page NIE had been independently verified by anyone inside Iraq.

Believe it or not, all of this does relate to Question 2, which asks why those who wrote the NIE did not speak up regarding its inaccuracies. It certainly seems to me that the 90-page NIE was never intended to be a true NIE. Instead, it was supposed to say what the Bush administration wanted it to say, which was provide support for everythin the administration had been saying and wanted to say to support going to war.

Support for this opinion comes from a November 9, 2003, article from The Independent, a British newspaper:

The man he picked to write it, the weapons expert Robert Walpole, had a track record of going back over old intelligence assessments and reworking them in accordance with the wishes of a specific political interest group. In 1998, he had come up with an estimate of the missile capabilities of various rogue states that managed to sound considerably more alarming than a previous CIA estimate issued three years earlier. On that occasion, he was acting at the behest of a congressional commission anxious to make the case for a missile defense system; the commission chairman was none other than Donald Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defense and a key architect of the Iraq war.

Mr Walpole's NIE on Iraq threw together all the elements that have now been discredited - Niger, the aluminum tubes, and so on. It also gave the misleading impression that intelligence analysts were in broad agreement about the Iraqi threat, relegating most of the doubts and misgivings to footnotes and appendices.

In other words, the answer to Question 2 as it relates to the 90-page version of the NIE is that the people who wrote it did not care about the truth, but instead cared only about supporting the Bush administration's case for war.

NOTE: For more info on Walpole, check out this post at Daily Kos.

• Question 2 and the 25-page white paper
  

Much has been made of the differences between the 90-page version and the declassified, 25-page version. Implicit in Question 2 is why were there differences? The short answer is that the 25-page version was never a summary of the NIE in the first place. Consequently, the 25-page document hereinafter will be referred to as "the 25-page white paper" or "white paper."

Work on this document actually started in May 2002, as explained in the Senate Intelligence Committee's report:

The IC [Intelligence Community] started production of the white paper in May 2002, months before the classified NIE was requested by Members of the SSCI. On May 8, 2002, an assistant to the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) sent an electronic mail (e-mail) to the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Near East and South Asia (NESA) asking him to prepare a white paper on Iraq's WMD programs. The NIO told Committee staff that the DDCI had recently attended a meeting at the White House, and the DDCI wanted the paper as a follow-up to the meeting discussions. The Deputy Director for Central Intelligence testified at a March 4, 2004 Committee hearing that the paper was requested by the National Security Council (NSC) Deputies Committee.

So, work on the 25-page version started approximately four months before work started on the NIE. But wait, there's more...The task was given by the NIO to an Iraq specialist in NESA, and the first draft was completed on May 22, 2002. However, the CIA had not provided a deadline, so work continued intermittently over the next few months. Now here is where things get even more interesting. During this interval, the NIO decided that the summary of the white paper was weak and that there was a need for a "full blown" key judgments section. And it just so happened that the actual NIE was being written at that time.

The NIO said that because his staff had not yet drafted an unclassified key judgments the National Intelligence Council (NIC) staff decided to declassify the NIE key judgments to use as the key judgments of the white paper and to make the paper the unclassified equivalent of the NIE.

In other words, the 25-page whitepaper was 1) written before the NIE was completed, 2) written before work ever started on the NIE, 3) had the key judgments of the NIE simply slapped onto it; and 4) was a separate and distinct document from the NIE. Anyone who doubts any of this should read on...

When asked why the 25-page white paper left out a great deal of content in the 90-page NIE, the NIO explained that things were left out of the white paper

because they were outside of the scope of the tasking for the unclassified paper. The unclassified paper had been tasked in May 2002 at the request of the Deputies Committee and the classified NIE was tasked in September 2002 at the request of Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Members. The papers' scopes were determined by those taskings.

And there you have it. Things like the caveats, quailifiers, and dissents never appeared in the white paper because they were never supposed to be part of the white paper. And that explains in part why nobody responsible for writing the 25-page white paper spoke up about any of its omissions, misstatements, or untruths.

Now add in that the NIE was supposed to be supportive of the war effort and that no one had time to give it a meaningful review before the vote on the Iraq War Resolution, and it would have been far more likely for people to read the 25-page white paper than the 90-page NIE. The white paper--with its complete lack of caveats, qualifiers, and dissents--would have made a much better sales tool than the 90-page NIE, and thus you have another part of the answer as to why those responsible for writing the white paper did not speak up.