As if Bush’s troubles with Republican senators this week weren’t enough, Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), Bush’s choice to head the CIA, raised some surprisingly interesting concerns during his Senate confirmation hearing about the White House’s use of intelligence before the war in Iraq began.
Representative Porter J. Goss, the nominee to become director of central intelligence, said on Monday that some prewar statements by senior Bush administration officials might well have overstated available intelligence about the threat posed by Iraq.
Under sharp questioning from a Senate Democrat, Mr. Goss, a Republican from Florida, said he agreed that statements by Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice that linked Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks; to Al Qaeda; and to an active nuclear weapons program appeared to have gone beyond what was spelled out in intelligence reports at the time.
Yet another vote of confidence in the Bush White House. The president’s own choice to head central intelligence believes top administration officials exaggerated the Iraqi threat. Feel safer yet?
For example, Goss was asked about the fact that Dick Cheney widely emphasized a since-discredited meeting in Prague between a Sept. 11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, and an Iraqi official. Cheney said the event had been “pretty well-confirmed,” despite the fact that no one in the intelligence community believes the meeting took place.
“I don’t think [the meeting] was as well confirmed perhaps as the vice president thought,” Goss said.
And then there was a statement from Condoleezza Rice from September 2002, in which the NSA said aluminum tubes being imported by Iraq “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs” and that “we know” that Iraq provided some training to al Qaeda in chemical weapons development — claims, again, that have been discredited.
Yesterday, Goss described Rice’s aluminum tubes comment as “an exaggeration.” As for the training claim, Goss said he, if he were DIA, would have asked Rice “what in fact was the basis for that statement.”
So, Bush’s hand-picked choice to head the CIA thinks the Vice President and the National Security Advisor exaggerated the Iraqi threat. I realize that Goss was trying to emphasize his independence as a way of reassuring skeptical lawmakers, but with just 42 days until the election, how does it look when the future CIA director thinks his soon-to-be colleagues misled the public about a non-existent terrorist threat?