James Risen is not willing to go so far. His book is filled with evidence supporting this interpretation, but he seems reluctant to embrace it. "[Paul] Wolfowitz personally complained to Tenet about the CIA's analytical work on Iraq and al-Qaeda," Risen says in discussing the use of intelligence to justify the war. Can we be in doubt why Wolfowitz complained, or why the agency assured Powell that Iraq was training al-Qaeda, scout's honor? When CIA officers told Tenet the war would be a mistake, Risen notes, "he would just come back from the White House and say they are going to do it." Risen sums up Tenet's attitude thus: "War with Iraq was inevitable, and it was time for the CIA to do its part." That seems clear enough; surely Risen means that the agency's part was to help beat the drum for war. But then Risen swings back, like a man facing snakes on one side and alligators on the other. Why was the information reported by Sawsan Alhaddad and the other Iraqis bottled up at the agency? "Petty turf battles and tunnel vision of the agency's officials" is Risen's first answer. In the next sentence he braces up, then wilts again:

"...Doubts were stifled because of the enormous pressure that officials at the CIA...felt to support the administration. CIA director George Tenet and his senior lieutenants became so...fearful of creating a rift with the White House, that they created a climate within the CIA in which warnings that the available evidence on Iraqi WMD was weak were either ignored or censored. Tenet and his senior aides may not have meant to foster that sort of work environment -- and perhaps did not even realize they were doing it...."

What can Risen be thinking? How could they not realize they were doing it? They were running the place.

Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense, was not the only official to let the CIA know what he wanted to hear. Rumsfeld set up a special office in the Pentagon to "re-look" the intelligence on Iraqi WMDs and then urged Tenet to listen to its findings. Vice President Cheney crossed the Potomac more than once to ask questions -- the same questions, over and over. John Bolton tried to fire resistant analysts in the State Department's intelligence shop and at the CIA; they kept their jobs, but who could fail to get the message? Robert Hutchings, a former chief of the National Intelligence Council, the group that wrote the October 2002 NIE, described Bolton's way of mining intelligence reports to come up with the administration's version of the world. "He took isolated facts and made much more to build a case than the intelligence warranted," he said. "It was a sort of cherry-picking of little factoids and little isolated bits that were drawn out to present the starkest-possible case."

These were not intellectual exercises; Bolton needed custom-built intelligence to support the administration's policies. "When policy officials came back repeatedly to push the same kind of judgments, and push the intelligence community to confirm a particular set of judgments," Hutchings said, "it does have the effect of politicizing intelligence, because the so-called ‘correct answer' becomes all too clear." Has the Senate Intelligence Committee got the fortitude to accept the implications of these facts and many others just like them?

The systematic exaggeration of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq and the flouting of FISA both required, and got, a degree of resolution in the White House that has few precedents in American history. The President has gotten away with it so far because he leaves no middle ground -- cut him some slack, or prepare to fight to the death. The fact that he enjoys a Republican majority in both houses of Congress gives him a margin of comfort, but I suspect that Democratic majorities would be just as reluctant, in the end, to call him on either count. Americans were ready enough to believe that one president might lie about a sexual affair; but they balk at concluding that his successor would pressure others to lie, and even would utter a few whoppers himself, so he could take the country to war.

Risen helps to explain how it was done, but lets it go at that. In his Fox News interview Vice President Cheney did not give an inch on the necessity of the NSA spying or of the war itself. "When we look back on this, ten years hence," he insisted, "we will [see that we] have fundamentally changed the course of history in that part of the world." A decade down the road we'll know if Cheney is right or wrong, and if the change is the one we wanted. The question now is whether the President could do it all again -- take the country to war, and scrap restraints on spying, just as he pleases. The answer is yes, unless Congress and the courts can say no.

Thomas Powers is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and is the author of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda; The Man Who Kept the Secrets; and Heisenberg's War.

This article appears in the February 23 issue of the New York Review of Books 

Copyright 2005 Thomas Powers

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