Most news outlets covered CIA Director George Tenet’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday, but what I found interesting wasn’t the point that the press was emphasizing.
The articles explain that Tenet continued to take responsibility for the fact that the CIA did not fight enough to stop the White House from repeating the false claim about Iraq purchasing uranium from Niger for its non-existent nuclear weapons program. Tenet, surprisingly, admitted to the committee’s senators yesterday that he never actually saw the State of the Union before it was delivered, but he nevertheless takes responsibility for the “mistake” because his staff approved the language.
While I guess it’s interesting that the CIA director didn’t read the SOTU in advance, this doesn’t strike me as a huge deal. Tenet had already personally told White House officials that the Niger claim was based on forged evidence three months before Bush’s January speech. It’s not his fault that someone at the White House kept fighting to put the claim back in Bush’s remarks.
Which leads me to the point I did find interesting. The Washington Post, among others, notes that the CIA — not Tenet, but other agency officials — approved Bush’s claim “after negotiations with the White House, according to congressional and administration sources” who were at yesterday’s closed-door Senate hearing. One anonymous Senator on the committee said he/she was troubled “as to why [the CIA] compromised after [Tenet] told us how dubious and incredible the intelligence was.”
Negotiations? Compromise? I don’t want to over-analyze the language here, but the public needs to know more about what these “negotiations” between the CIA and the White House were all about.
In fact, the admission that there was some kind of “compromise” is telling, in and of itself.
Remember, Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Advisor, said last month that the White House “did not know at the time” of the SOTU that the documents were bogus. “[N]o one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery,” Rice said.
If no one at the White House had “doubts and suspicions,” then what, exactly, were they negotiating with the CIA about?
I think we know the answer to that question. NPR, you might recall, reported in June that intelligence officials saw early drafts of the State of the Union and expressed concerns about the bogus Niger report. One anonymous intelligence official told NPR that “White House officials” concluded, “‘Why don’t we say the British say this?'”
In light of Tenet’s talk about the negotiations, all of this seems clear. The White House wanted to say, despite earlier warnings and information that the Niger documents were fraudulent, that Iraq had purchased uranium for its nuclear program. The CIA didn’t want this claim in the speech because they knew it was false. The “negotiations” were over exactly what the speech would say and how Bush could make the claim. They “compromised” on attributing the claim to the British.
This afforded Bush officials the opportunity to make a fairly pathetic response to charges of deception — we weren’t wrong, Tony Blair was. As Michael Kinsley put it, “This is a contemptible argument in any event.”
Or, as Slate’s William Saletan explained, the White House seems to believe that “now it’s OK not just to permit a fishy statement but to repeat it, as long as you attribute it to somebody else.”
Meanwhile, there’s still the matter of who, exactly, was doing the negotiating for the White House? In other words, the CIA was pushing the line that the Niger claim was false. Who was pushing back? And, of no small consequence, wasn’t that person (or those persons) intentionally trying to deceive the American public?
During yesterday’s testimony, Tenet said a White House official “insisted” that the SOTU include an unverified claim about Iraq’s nuclear program.
The questions then become who this official is and who told him or her to make this argument?
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee members who this White House official is, but at this point, no one can say who this because of the confidentiality of the proceedings.
“[Tenet] certainly told us who the person was who was insistent on putting this language in which the CIA knew to be incredible, this language about the uranium shipment from Africa,” Durbin said this morning. “And there was this negotiation between the White House and the CIA about just how far you could go and be close to the truth and unfortunately those sixteen words were included in the most important speech the president delivers in any given year.”
It’s only a matter of time before this name leaks to the press. Then, I suppose, the White House will have yet another person to whom they can try and pin responsibility. Eventually, though, it was Bush’s words in Bush’s speech written by Bush’s speechwriters in Bush’s White House. Will responsibility ever reach the top?