Lying 'Intelligence'

By now, all members of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction ought to have fallen on their swords.

Why?

Here is the way the commissioners began their report made to President Bush just a month before the London Sunday Times published the so-called Downing Street Memo.

On the brink of war, and in front of the whole world, the United States government asserted that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, had biological weapons and mobile biological weapon production facilities, and had stockpiled and was producing chemical weapons.

All of this was based on the assessments of the U.S. intelligence community.

And not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over.

What was contained in the Downing Street Memo that should cause Commission members to fall on their swords?

Well, central to the memo was the report Richard Dearlove – director of the British equivalent of our CIA – made of his just-completed talks with then-CIA Director George Tenet and then-National Security Adviser Condi Rice.

Dearlove reported that "military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Intelligence was being "fixed"? Now, admittedly, the Commission’s report was about U.S. intelligence capabilities.

And the Commission did note that all of these ridiculous charges about Saddam’s "reconstitution" of his WMD capabilities – known to have been completely destroyed under U.N. supervision by 1997– were based upon "assessments of the U.S. intelligence community."

But shouldn’t the Commission have at least mentioned – if not lamented – the inexplicable failure of our intelligence community to even take note of – much less accept – the reports provided them by the International Atomic Energy Agency, especially in the months leading up to the pre-emptive attack on Iraq to "disarm" Saddam Hussein?

In his final report before being forced to withdraw from Iraq at the end of 1998 by President Clinton, Director General Mohamed ElBaradei had reported: