Oh Please

The thrust of the SSIC report is that the CIA greatly overestimated the threat of Saddam Hussein and led our unsuspecting Dear Leader to invade Iraq on false pretenses. Imagine that. And one of the main documents cited in the SSIC report as proof of that claim was the October 2002 NIE report (that, incidentally, had to be specifically requested by Senators on the committee.)

Today’s LA Times notes that the SSIC report points to the fact that key revisions were made to the public version of this NIE, which is interesting because nobody knows who did it. Evidently, the public NIE was phrased in language that was much less ambiguous than the original CIA document:

During a briefing before the report was released, one committee aide said the Senate panel had asked Tenet and Stu Cohen — who, as acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council, oversaw production of the NIE — who was responsible for inserting those words into the unclassified document.

“They did not know and could not explain,” said the aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A similar degree of mystery surrounds the larger question of exactly how the classified NIE morphed into its unclassified version.

According to the committee report, the intelligence community began preparing an unclassified white paper on Iraq’s banned weapons in May 2002, at the request of the National Security Council.

Months later, as the administration began to make its public case for war, Congress requested an official NIE. Officials at the National Intelligence Council decided to merge the white paper with declassified elements of the NIE to produce the official unclassified version.

Yes, it’s quite a mystery as to who revised that NIE. One clue might be the fact that a month before the NIE was completed, the White House had released a “background paper” called “A Decade of Deception and Defiance” which very unambiguously laid out the case that Iraq was swimming in bio and chem weapons and could make a nuclear bomb in a matter of months. (Interestingly, this very same backround paper has recently been revealed to have used Judith Miller’s Chalabi-fed reporting over the CIA’s in at least one case.)

Now, this proves nothing about whether the White House “sexed up” the NIE but it’s a fact that the White House released a backround report in September of 2002 that made sweeping claims about Saddam’s WMD and terrorist ties. It is also a fact that the CIA created a classified National Intelligence Estimate a month or so later that was riddled with caveats and ambiguities about the Iraq threat. And it is now known that someone altered this classified NIE’s language for public consumption to reflect the unambiguous assertions set forth in the earlier White House backround paper.

“The fact that the NIE changed so dramatically from its classified to its unclassified form and broke all in one direction, toward a more dangerous scenario … I think was highly significant,” the committee’s vice chairman, Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), said Friday.

No kidding.