Current News in Context
July 13, 2004
Jessica Mathews offers a powerful rebuke to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on WMD's. "But by concluding that there was no political pressure on the intelligence community, the Committee's report leaves a huge contradiction hanging in midair. How else can those 2002 changes-all describing a more dire threat-be explained? Demands by top officials for access to raw intelligence and the setting up of an independent intelligence cell in the Pentagon were among many departures from normal practice that are hard to explain in any other way"
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Statement from Jessica Mathews in Response to U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Press Conference on Iraq (July 9, 2004)
"The Senate Intelligence Committee's report is a welcome confirmation of what has been evident from open sources for many months: there was an enormous intelligence failure on WMD in Iraq. However, the report is of little use in guiding intelligence reform because it tells less than half the story.
"Based on Senator Roberts' and Senator Rockefeller's descriptions, the intelligence failures that the Committee found were virtually identical to those laid out in the January 2004 Carnegie report, WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications. The Committee also importantly confirms that the content of intelligence reporting shifted dramatically over the course of 2002, culminating in the deeply flawed NIE that was the primary basis for congressional authorization of the war.
"But by concluding that there was no political pressure on the intelligence community, the Committee's report leaves a huge contradiction hanging in midair. How else can those 2002 changes-all describing a more dire threat-be explained? Demands by top officials for access to raw intelligence and the setting up of an independent intelligence cell in the Pentagon were among many departures from normal practice that are hard to explain in any other way. At some point, if it walks like a duck and quacks, it's a duck. In 'Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong' (Atlantic Monthly, January 2004), Kenneth Pollack made abundantly clear that analysts felt the pressure and were in no doubt about the message.
"By denying the obvious, and by failing to examine the Administration's role, including top officials' misuse of the intelligence product, the Senate report leaves an unfair and incorrect impression that the entire blame for this tragic episode rests entirely on the intelligence agencies."
Jessica Mathews, president, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and co-author of WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications
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