Boot, Kondracke falsely suggested Bush administration has been cleared of manipulating Iraq intelligence

Written by Simon Maloy

Published


In his November 2 column, Los Angeles Times columnist Max Boot falsely claimed that the Robb-Silberman report and the Senate Intelligence Committee's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq “euthanized” claims that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence in the buildup to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Similarly, on the November 1 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, Roll Call executive editor Morton M. Kondracke misleadingly claimed that there is no available evidence indicating that the administration “trumped the evidence up.” In fact, neither the Robb-Silberman commission nor the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the Bush administration's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence. Indeed, Democrats say that it's the Senate Intelligence Committee's failure to investigate the issue of whether the administration “trumped the evidence up” that prompted their decision to force the Senate into closed session on November 1. If there is little evidence that the administration trumped up its case for war, that may be because it didn't; or it may be because no formal investigation that might uncover such evidence has been done.

Senate Democrats held a closed-door November 1 session to discuss intelligence issues and demand that the Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), follow through on “phase two” of its inquiry into prewar intelligence -- an examination of the administration's use of the intelligence.

In his Times column, Boot attacked former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was sent to Niger by the CIA in 2002 to investigate a reported sale of yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Wilson found no evidence of such a transaction and reported his findings to the CIA. After President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, in which he referenced alleged efforts by Iraq to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger as justification for the impending invasion of Iraq, Wilson publicly announced his findings in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed. Eight days later, syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, citing "[t]wo senior administration officials," identified Wilson's wife, undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame, in his column as “an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” The alleged leaking of Plame's identity is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation by special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Media Matters for America's coverage of the Plame controversy can be viewed here.

After falsely claiming that the Senate Intelligence Committee's 2004 report “was not kind” to Wilson's findings, Boot went on to write:

This is not an isolated example. Pretty much all of the claims that the administration doctored evidence about Iraq have been euthanized, not only by the Senate committee but also by the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission. The latest proof that intelligence was not “politicized” comes from an unlikely source -- Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, who has been denouncing the hawkish “cabal” supposedly leading us toward “disaster.” Yet, in between bouts of trashing the administration, Wilkerson said on Oct. 19 that “the consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming” that Hussein was building illicit weapons.

On Special Report, Kondracke was asked by host Brit Hume, “was the intelligence community, at the end of the day, as a community, in support of what the administration was claiming or not?” Kondracke responded:

KONDRACKE: Yes. Yes. Yes. Fundamentally, they were. I mean, you don't see -- except on this whole issue about what Joe Wilson found and didn't find, because obviously there were people in both the State Department and the CIA who bitterly opposed what the Bush administration is doing. But there is no proof that the administration -- now, and the Democrats would like to find it -- that somehow they trumped the evidence up. There's no evidence of that.

As Media Matters for America noted, the Robb-Silberman commission -- led by Charles S. Robb, former Virginia governor and U.S. senator, and Laurence R. Silberman, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit -- was charged with “reviewing the intelligence capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community ... with respect to threats such as those posed to the United States by Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).” The commission did not examine how the intelligence was handled by the administration, as Silberman made clear in a March 31 press conference: “We did not -- our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.” Similarly, the Senate Intelligence Committee decided that the first phase of its inquiry would not include analysis of the Bush administrations use or misuse of the intelligence. It is the completion of “phase two” -- which was to include an investigation and analysis of the administration's handling of pre-war intelligence -- that the Democrats are demanding.