Remember That
Mushroom Cloud?
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web, November 2, 2005
The indictment of Lewis Libby on
charges of lying to a grand jury about the outing of Valerie Wilson has focused
attention on the lengths to which the Bush administration went in 2003 to try to
distract the public from this central fact: American soldiers found a lot
of things in Iraq, including a well-armed insurgency their bosses never
anticipated, but they did not find weapons of mass destruction.
It's clear from the indictment that Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff
formed the command bunker for this misdirection campaign. But there is a
much larger issue than the question of what administration officials said about
Iraq after the invasion -- it's what they said about Iraq before the invasion.
Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader, may have been grandstanding yesterday
when he forced the Senate to hold a closed session on the Iraqi intelligence,
but at least he gave the issue a much-needed push.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin
Powell and George Tenet, to name a few leading figures, built support for the
war by telling the world that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons,
feverishly developing germ warfare devices and racing to build a nuclear bomb.
Some of them, notably Mr. Cheney, the administration's doomsayer in chief, said
Iraq had conspired with Al Qaeda and implied that Saddam Hussein was connected
to 9/11.
Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee did a good bipartisan job of
explaining that the intelligence in general was dubious, old and even faked by
foreign sources. The panel said the analysts had suffered from groupthink.
At the time, the highest-ranking officials in Washington were demanding evidence
against Iraq.
But that left this question: If the intelligence was so bad and so moldy,
why was it presented to the world as what Mr. Tenet, then the director of
central intelligence, famously called "a slam-dunk" case?
Were officials fooled by bad intelligence, or knowingly hyping it?
Certainly, the administration erased caveats, dissents and doubts from the
intelligence reports before showing them to the public. And there was
never credible intelligence about a working relationship between Iraq and Al
Qaeda.
Under a political deal that Democrats should not have approved, the Intelligence
Committee promised to address these questions after the 2004 election. But
a year later, there is no sign that this promise is being kept, other than
unconvincing assurances from Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican who is chairman
of the intelligence panel, that people are working on it.
So far, however, there has been only one uncirculated draft report by one
committee staff member on the narrow question of why the analysts didn't predict
the ferocity of the insurgency. The Republicans have not even agreed to do
a final report on the conflict between the intelligence and the administration's
public statements.
Mr. Reid wrested a commitment from the Senate to have a bipartisan committee
report by Nov. 14 on when the investigation will be done. We hope Mr.
Roberts now gives this half of the investigation the same urgency he gave the
first half and meets his commitment to examine all aspects of this mess,
including how the information was used by the administration. Americans
are long overdue for an answer to why they were told there were weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq.
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