PHASE II FACT CHECK: RESPONDING TO DEMOCRATS’ KEY MYTHS

 The Truth about the Democrats’ Additional Views

Statements Report

Myth 1:   The statements report was “slow-walked” by Committee Republicans and a draft report was never presented to the Committee membership prior to the change in the Senate majority in 2007.

Fact:  The Democrats were the ones who employed delaying tactics.  The statements draft did take a long time to prepare because of excessive and extraneous information requests from Committee Democrats.   Here’s the actual time-line:  Committee members were presented with the staff’s work which compared the statements submitted by Committee Democrats (nearly 400 statements) and Committee Republicans (approximately 100) to the intelligence at a May 2005 business meeting.  Members were asked to judge for themselves whether the statements were substantiated by the intelligence.  Committee Democrats rejected this plan and then insisted that the Committee interview policymakers before any determination had been made regarding whether the policymakers’ statements were substantiated by intelligence.  In November 2005, Committee Democrats insisted that the Committee prepare a draft which included “all” of the available intelligence, necessitating a new document call for over 40,000 additional documents from the intelligence community.  This information was incorporated into a draft and circulated to Committee members in September 2006, before the change in Senate majority.   (The majority knows this because they used that draft as the primary source of intelligence information for their own report.)  Despite the demands from Committee Democrats in the last Congress to include “all” of the intelligence, analyze 400 statements, and interview policymakers, the majority’s Phase II “statements” report does none of those things.  This suggests that these demands were mere delaying tactics by the Democrats.   

 Myth 2: In the statements report “the Committee decided” to concentrate its analysis on only statements from administration officials. 

 Fact: The decision to review only those statements from administration officials and to reject for inclusion statements made by Democrats, including members of Congress and the previous administration, was made unilaterally by the Committee Chairman.  The issue was never discussed by the members of the Committee at any business meetings and the Chairman refused to allow a vote on a motion offered by the Vice Chairman to include statements from members of Congress.

 Myth 3: Members of Congress did not have the same ready access to intelligence as senior Executive branch policymakers.

 Fact:  All of the intelligence analyzed in this report was readily available to Members of Congress.  In fact, some of the intelligence used for comparison to administration statements was only available to Members of Congress because it was provided during closed Committee hearings.  Much of the other intelligence included in the report was from major intelligence products with wide dissemination, including National Intelligence Estimates—some requested by Members of Congress—and daily intelligence products sent to the Intelligence, Armed Services, Appropriations, and Foreign Relations Committees.

 Myth 4: The “hastily produced NIE” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities was published “mere days” before the Congress was scheduled to vote on the resolution to use force in Iraq and after the Administration had made “repeated” pubic assertions regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism.

 Fact: The NIE on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities was published nearly two weeks before Congress voted on the Iraq war resolution and the key assessments had been briefed to members of the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, among others, a month before the Iraq vote.  Additionally, the judgments in the NIE were not new.  As the majority’s own report shows, numerous intelligence assessments had identical or similar judgments to those in the NIE months prior to its publication.  Finally, the majority report identified only two speeches, not repeated statements, which discussed Iraq ’s weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism prior to publication of the NIE.

 Myth 5: Senior administration officials repeatedly spoke in declarative and unequivocal terms about Iraq ’s weapons of mass destruction programs and support for terrorists that were not substantiated.

 Fact: The intelligence assessments were declarative and unequivocal in their assessment that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  The Committee’s inquiry shows that statements by the Bush Administration and other policymakers (including many Democrats) that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, and had chemical and biological weapons, including a mobile biological weapons program, were substantiated by a large body of intelligence information prior to the war.

 ·        While postwar information now indicates that the intelligence upon which these statements were based was wrong in many instances, the statements made by policymakers, both Republican and Democrat, were based on the intelligence assessments available at the time.

 ·        For example, a key judgment of the NIE, the Intelligence Community’s most comprehensive assessment on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was that “ Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it would probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade.”

 ·        The same Intelligence Community assessment stated that Iraq , “is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program,” “has chemical and biological weapons,” and “has mobile facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW agents.”

 Myth 6: Administration officials made public claims that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had an “operational partnership and joint involvement in carrying out the attacks of September 11^th.”

 Fact: None of the statements from administration officials claimed that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had an “operational partnership” or claimed “joint involvement in carrying out the attacks of September 11^th.”  In fact, administration statements about Iraq ’s links to terrorists and connections with al-Qa’ida, in particular, essentially mirror the intelligence analysis.  Before the war, CIA described the “Iraq–al-Qa’ida relationship,” assessing that there were contacts between Iraq and al-Qa’ida, that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with training in chemical and biological weapons, and that al-Qa’ida members, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, were present in Iraq.

 ·        In September 2002, former DCI Tenet testified to Congress that:

 -          Iraq and al-Qa’ida have had senior level contacts going back a decade.

 -          Iraq provided training to al-Qa’ida members in Iraq –of most concern in the area of chemical and biological agents.

 -          Iraq is providing safehaven to al-Qa’ida members, including in Baghdad .

 ·        Before the war, the CIA stated, “We have reporting from reliable clandestine and press sources that at least eight direct meetings between senior Iraqi representatives and top al-Qa’ida operatives took place from the early 1990s to the present.  Several dozen additional direct or indirect such meetings are attested to by less reliable clandestine and press sources during the same period.”

 ·        The CIA also assessed that, “Reporting shows that unknown numbers of al-Qa’ida associates fleeing Afghanistan since December have used Iraq–including the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, Baghdad , and other regions–as a safehaven and transit area.”

 Myth 7: The Administration exploited its declassification authority, knowing that others attempting to disclose additional details that might provide balance or improve accuracy would be prevented from doing so under the threat of prosecution.

 Fact: In several instances Members of Congress requested the declassification of intelligence analysis specifically, they said, to provide a balanced perspective and inform the public.  These members were not “threatened with prosecution;” rather the information they requested was quickly declassified by the CIA.  If Members of Congress wanted additional information declassified they could have asked.  To pretend now that Members of Congress were helpless in fully informing the public is nonsense.

 Myth 8: The Committee’s Iraq investigation revealed how the Administration applied pressure on intelligence analysts prior to the war.

 Fact: The Committee’s July 2004 report thoroughly examined the question of pressure on the analysts and unanimously concluded:

 ·        The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq ’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

 ·        Regarding terrorism, the Committee found that none of the analysts or other people interviewed by the Committee said that they were pressured to change their conclusions related to Iraq ’s links to terrorism.

 ·        The Committee found that after 9/11, analysts were under tremendous pressure to make correct assessments, to avoid missing a credible threat, and to avoid an intelligence failure on the scale of 9/11.  In other words, analysts felt pressured to do their job accurately and not be sloppy– something this Committee and the American public expects from our Intelligence Community.

 ·        It is noteworthy that the intelligence assessments about Iraq’s links to terrorism from the analysts who felt pressured to make correct judgments, were, in fact, more accurate than the assessments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, suggesting that such questioning is beneficial to the ultimate product.

 Myth 9:  Statements about 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta meeting with Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) officer al-Ani in Prague in 2001 were not substantiated by the intelligence assessment at the time the statements were made.

 Fact:  Vice President Cheney made three prewar public statements—on December 9, 2001, March 24, 2002, and September 8, 2002—regarding intelligence reporting of this meeting.

 ·        During the last week of October 2001, the Czech government publicly confirmed reports of the meeting.

 ·        In September 2002, the CIA assessed that, “some evidence asserts that Atta met with Prague IIS chief Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani; other evidence casts doubt on this possibility.” 

 ·        It was not until January 2003 that CIA assessed that the “most reliable information casts doubt on the possibility” of the meeting.   

 ·        It is simply false to claim that the Committee has any information that the CIA or any other Intelligence Agency produced an assessment prior to these statements discounting the Prague meeting.  

 Myth 10: The Bush Administration claimed that Iraq would give WMD to al-Qa’ida or other terrorist organizations.

 Fact: The Administration did not claim that Iraq would give WMD to terrorists, rather that it could.  Given that the U.S. Intelligence Community judgments that Iraq had WMD and had known ties to terrorist organizations, it was not unreasonable for policymakers to have concerns that a rogue regime like Saddam’s could give those weapons to terrorists.  As the Democrat statements above demonstrate, members of both parties shared those concerns.  

 Myth 11: The key judgments of the October 2002 NIE stated that Saddam had no current intentions of conducting terrorist attacks against the United States .

 Fact: The NIE did not make such a statement.  The NIE did state:

 ·        Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge. Such attacks—more likely with biological than chemical agents—probably would be carried out by special forces or intelligence operatives.

 ·        Analysts concluded that if Saddam Hussein perceived an inevitable and imminent U.S. attack on Iraq , he was less likely to feel constrained in his use of terrorism.

 Rome Report

 Myth 12: The Rome report “details the intelligence activities of Defense Department policy officials conducted outside the intelligence community.”

 Fact:  As bad as the majority’s Rome report is, even it does not claim that the Rome meetings or any other activities of the policy office of the Department of Defense were “intelligence activities.”  Nowhere in the report is such a claim made, nor is there any evidence that suggests policy officials were involved in intelligence activities.

 Myth 13:  The former Committee Chairman “farmed out” the Committee’s inquiry of Department of Defense officials to the DoD Inspector General.

 Fact:  The former Committee Chairman asked the Department of Defense Inspector General to examine two DoD offices named in the Committee’s agreed upon terms of reference in an effort to move the review, which had become stalled after then-Vice Chairman Rockefeller accused Under-Secretary Feith of possible unlawful activities (something Rockefeller’s own report  now shows to have been a false charge).  In the end, it appears that Chairman Rockefeller found this DoD IG review to be a suitable replacement for a Committee inquiry since he declined to direct the Committee to review these activities and instead decided to examine a Pentagon meeting about Iran which had little to do with Under-Secretary Feith’s office.  If the Chairman truly believes that this was “farming out” work that should have been handled by the Committee, why did the Chairman not direct that this work be part of the Committee’s review? 

 Myth 14: The DoD Inspector General performed, “extensive interviews and a thorough review of documents” for its review of allegations that Under Secretary Feith’s office was engaged in intelligence activities.

 Fact:  The DoD Inspector General’s review of Under Secretary Feith’s office was neither extensive nor thorough.  In fact, during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in which the Acting Inspector General acknowledged that key individuals had never been interviewed for his review, Senator Warner expressed “serious reservations about the manner in which [the review] was conducted and the thoroughness” of it.  Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin assured Senator Warner that his own Committee would “make up for any shortfalls” in the IG’s review.  In addition to being a poorly researched inquiry, the Inspector General’s ridiculous charge that recommendations from a policy office can be described as “intelligence activities” is troubling.  Such premise means that activities of agencies and departments throughout the government that offer an opinion on intelligence, including those of Congress, would be “intelligence activities.”  Accepting such a definition of intelligence activities would endanger Congress’s oversight responsibilities and the responsibilities of policymakers throughout the government to question and challenge the assessments of intelligence analysts.  

 Myth 15: The Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered an “attempt by DoD policy officials to shape and politicize intelligence in order to bolster the Administration’s policy of invasion in its July 2004 report.”

 Fact:  The Committee’s July 2004 report found nothing of the sort.  Rather, the Committee’s report noted that 9/11 changed the intensity with which policymakers should review and question threat information and said that analysts should expect difficult and repeated questioning from them.  The Committee found that in the case of Iraq ’s links to terrorists, such questions had forced analysts to review their work which often resulted in finding previously overlooked information.  The Committee’s unanimous report said it “found that this process—the policymakers probing questions—actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) products.” 

 Myth 16: The Chairman’s decision to focus its inquiry of DoD policy officials on meetings about Iran, rather than the issues outlined in the Committee’s agreed upon terms of reference, was a “concession to the Vice Chairman’s request.”

 Fact: In a February 2007 letter, the Vice Chairman wrote to the Chairman that he considered the portion of the Phase II inquiry of the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy “concluded” as a result of the DoD IG’s report clearing the Under Secretary of any unlawful or unauthorized activities.  In what turned out to be a prescient statement, the Vice Chairman said that the Committee’s pursuit of such a nebulous and subjective inquiry into “inappropriate intelligence activities” would assuredly draw the Committee backward into a bitter, partisan debate.  Chairman Rockefeller rejected the Vice Chairman’s request to focus on the other parts of Phase II and move on to real intelligence oversight and reform.  Despite the Vice Chairman’s numerous and repeated requests for an explanation as to why the Chairman was reviewing meetings about Iran as part of the Committee’s Phase II Iraq inquiry, Chairman Rockefeller never once said that his decision was a “concession” to the Vice Chairman, nor did he state that this was in response to the Vice Chairman’s letter.  The first time this claim was ever made was in Chairman Rockefeller’s additional views.   

 Myth 17: The Rome meeting inquiry has been part of the Committee’s Phase II inquiry but had been “suspended.”

 Fact: Despite the Chairman’s claims to Committee Members that there was an agreement between him and the previous Chairman to examine the Rome meetings as part of the Committee’s Phase II inquiry, the facts show this was not the case.  A letter from the previous Chairman to then-Vice Chairman Rockefeller in March 2006 stated, “You have asked to restart the Committee investigation into the Pentagon’s Rome meetings.  Clearly, this does not fall within the scope of Phase II.  As you know, the Committee reviewed this issue nearly three years ago and found that it involved Iran and not Iraq .  In addition, the Committee found nothing which required additional investigation.”  While the previous Chairman agreed to examine the Rome issue as part of regular oversight, he considered the matter completed and closed when the reviewers found that the meetings were related to Iran, did not involve the collection of intelligence, and did not involve any violations of law or regulation.

 Myth 18: The Rome report is based on numerous interviews including interviews of those individuals who attended the Rome and Paris meetings.

 Fact: The Chairman refused to instruct the Committee’s review team to conduct or even request several necessary interviews, including an interview with one of only two DoD officials who attended the Rome meeting and the only DoD officials who attended the Paris meeting.  The Chairman refused to request interviews of National Security Advisor Hadley, the Ambassador to Italy , the Director of DIA, Assistant Secretary of State Armitage, Under Secretary of State Grossman, and several other Pentagon and NSC officials.  The review staff only conducted an interview of former DCI Tenet at the eleventh hour, at the request of the minority, and without the presence of any minority staff. 

 Myth 19: The Rome meetings involved “clandestine meetings … between DoD policy officials and Iranians … in which intelligence was collected but kept from the Intelligence Community.”

 Fact: The majority’s own flawed Rome report shows that the Rome meetings were not “clandestine” nor did they involve the collection of “intelligence.”  The meetings were conducted for informational purposes. 

 Myth 20: The majority report shows that Pentagon officials “undertook the collection of sensitive intelligence without coordinating their activities or reporting the information they collected through proper channels.”

 Fact:  There were no “proper” channels to report information collected in Rome because policy officials are not required to report the content of their meetings to the Intelligence Community.  As the Committee report shows, these officials also were not required to coordinate their activities with the Intelligence Community.

 Myth 21: DoD officials’ actions to “blindly disregard the red flags over the role played by Mr. Ghorbanifar in these meetings and to wall-off the Intelligence Community from its [sic] activities and the information it [sic] obtained were improper and demonstrated a fundamental disdain for the Intelligence Community’s role in vetting sensitive sources.”

 Fact: The minority’s own report shows that there were no “red flags” about Ghorbanifar’s participation in the Rome meetings because neither the DoD officials nor Intelligence Community officials knew that he was involved in the meetings until after they occurred.  In fact, the report shows that once DoD became aware of Ghorbanifar’s involvement as an intermediary, it was viewed as a negative factor in the decision about whether to proceed with further contact of the Iranians.   Additionally, DoD officials did not “wall-off” the Intelligence Community from their activities.  As the majority’s own report shows, DoD officials provided the information it obtained during the Rome meetings to the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and put Mr. Ledeen in contact with the agency directly so that he could provide DIA with any pertinent information about the Iranians and the information they provided.  

 Other Claims

 Myth 22: The Committee’s inquiry detailed how the Iraqi National Congress attempted to influence policy on Iraq by providing false information and how this information was embraced despite warning of fabrication.

 Fact: The Committee found no evidence that the INC intentionally provided false information to the United States .  The INC regularly contacted Iraqi defectors.  If a defector had information which the INC believed might be useful to the United States, they referred the defector to the United States government.  Some of the information from these defectors was determined to be correct, some was wrong, and some remains ambiguous, even today.  But, the INC never made an assessment about the accuracy of the information provided by these individuals and made clear that it was not in a position to do so.

 ·        Information from the INC and INC-affiliated defectors was not used in the October 2002 NIE key judgments about Iraq ’s nuclear, chemical, and missile programs.  Information from one INC-affiliated defector was used, however, as corroborating reporting in the NIE judgment that Iraq had mobile facilities for producing biological warfare agents.  The use of the defector, whom the Intelligence Community judged to be a fabricator, as corroboration of the mobile biological warfare program was a serious Intelligence Community error.

 ·        Information from the INC and INC-affiliated defectors was not used in any key judgment about Iraq ’s links to terrorism.  Intelligence Community terrorism analysts discussed information from INC-affiliated defectors in its assessments about Iraq ’s links to terrorism, but described the information as “questionable” and “exaggerated.”

 Myth 23: The Committee’s inquiry documented how the Administration ignored the Intelligence Community’s pre-war judgments of post-war Iraq .

 Fact: The Committee’s inquiry found no such thing.  The Committee did not find that policymakers ignored Intelligence assessments about postwar Iraq .  The Committee’s report showed that the intelligence Community outlined a range of potential challenges an occupying force would likely face in postwar Iraq and in the region, some of which occurred.  Some assessed challenges did not occur or occurred in ways that differed from the assessments.  The Intelligence Community outlined so many possibilities, that some of them were bound to turn out right.  Such assessments that describe every potential scenario are not particularly helpful to policymakers. 

 Myth 24:  The findings and conclusions of the Committee’s Iraq investigation were an important catalyst in bringing about subsequent legislative and administrative reforms of the Intelligence Community.

 Fact: The Committee’s first report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Postwar Iraq was an important catalyst in bringing about reforms of the Intelligence Community, but the subsequent five Phase II reports were not.  Not one of these reports has resulted in a single reform or improvement to the Intelligence Community, demonstrating that the Phase II effort was merely a political exercise.

 Myth 25:  Every effort was made to accommodate changes proposed by all members.

 Fact: The minority was excluded from the drafting of these reports and deprived of any meaningful role in the work that produced them.  The minority was not provided drafts until two months after the majority had reviewed them and the Staff Director had directed the review staff to make substantive changes.  From the time the drafts were circulated to members on January 15, 2008 to their adoption on April 1, 2008, the Committee did not hold a single business meeting where the substance of the reports was discussed.  The Chairman demanded that amendments on the drafts be filed before staff discussions were complete and while several issues remained outstanding that could not be addressed through the amendment process.  Despite being told that these issues were member issues, the Vice-Chairman was denied the opportunity to raise these issues with Committee members at the business meeting.  The Vice-Chairman, on behalf of the minority, had nearly 100 amendments outstanding when the Chairman called a final vote on the reports.  This was hardly an effort to accommodate all members.  

 Myth 26: Of the over 170 amendments filed by the Vice Chairman, the Committee was able to resolve or accept over half.  The reports as adopted reflected over 300 changes made at the request of the Vice Chairman.

 Fact:  The Vice-Chairman had nearly 100 amendments outstanding at the time of the final vote on the reports.  If the report drafters made 300 changes to the majority reports, many of these were not at the request of the minority. 

 Myth 27: The Vice Chairman’s remaining amendments were requested changes that would have gutted the report’s conclusions, changed the factual underpinnings of the investigation, and significantly delayed completion of the long-overdue reports.

 Fact: We agree that the Vice Chairman’s amendments would have “changed the factual underpinnings” of the inquiry—they would have made it supported by facts and would have prevented distortions of the intelligence and policymakers’ statements that currently exist in the reports.  They would not have delayed completion of the reports because the changes could have been made immediately—none of the amendments filed required additional work or research from the majority.  They would not have “gutted” the report’s conclusions; they would have made them based in reality.  Finally, even if the Chairman really believed these things, there would be no excuse for denying the Vice Chairman’s right to offer his amendments.