Pre-War Intelligence Failures Merit Investigation

Pre-War Intelligence Failures Merit Investigation
By Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA)

The American public deserves to know all of the facts that led us to where we are today in Iraq.

They should not have to default to television's partisan, shouting-heads news shows to get their answers. Nor should they accept government spin. An independent investigation is warranted.

The recent revelation by a former Bush Administration diplomat dismissing one of the President's central reasons for the Iraq war as being based on "false intelligence" calls into serious question the quality of information being produced by our national and international security agencies.

Compounding the problem, press reports quoting Administration officials who say the White House may have knowingly passed on the faulty claims to justify the war are challenging the integrity of other pre-war intelligence.
Former American Ambassador Joseph Wilson was enlisted last year by the CIA and Vice President Cheney to travel to Niger to investigate claims that Hussein had tried to buy uranium for a nuclear weapons program.

He reported that he found no evidence for those claims and says he shared his findings with the CIA and other top agencies. A year later the President cited the Niger threat in his State of the Union speech which used an impressive array of intelligence reports to convince the majority of Americans, Congress and the media that we were in imminent danger from Iraq.

The White House has defended the statement as being technically correct since it was changed to reference a British white paper on the subject. The Washington Post has reported that the CIA tried to persuade the British government that the report was false long before the president's speech. A recent CBS news investigation also reported that the White House had declined a request by the CIA to remove the statement from the president's speech.

Wilson recently wrote in the New York Times that "Based on my experience…I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

The phony Iraq-Niger deal leads to further questions about pre-war intelligence reports. Intelligence officers personally told me in Congressional briefings that Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction on American troops once they stepped on Iraqi soil. I was also told that the Administration had evidence of alleged Baghdad-al Qaeda ties. Both were used to sell the war. Both were later proven to be false.

As far as our intelligence agencies' report card goes, we now know that it doesn't matter whether or not WMD's are found. Our CIA and National Security Council flunked the "imminent danger" portion of the test because WMD's were never used.

It would be folly to miscalculate the rising call for answers as the din of those who originally questioned our role in this war. And it would be shortsighted to merely find a scapegoat, hang the blame on a single bureaucrat and pronounce the matter closed.

Two efforts have been introduced in Congress to get the answers we need to prevent future security lapses. Legislation by Rep. Ellen Tauscher would force public hearings on the integrity of our intelligence reports by creating a bipartisan select committee made up of 15 members of the House. Rep. Henry Waxman has introduced a bill to create an investigatory board independent of Congressional partisans modeled after the 9/11 independent commission.

The White House, Congress and the public need to get behind both efforts.

At best, mistaken assertions were based on faulty intelligence reports. At worst, there was a deliberate effort to mislead
Congress and the American public.

It is in everyone's best interest, including the President, to get to the bottom of this. Fast. This is about the safety of our troops and the integrity of our government, not presidential primaries or partisan politics. Bad security information is neither a Republican problem nor a Democratic problem. It is an American problem we all have to share and repair.
An independent investigation can put to rest suspicions that Americans accepted a war that is costing 30 American lives and $4 billion per month based on wrong information.