EDITORIAL
Final verdict elusive in intelligence fiasco
The authors of the report from the latest commission on the Iraq war intelligence fiasco were savvy enough to know they'd have zero credibility if they didn't credit the conventional wisdom that America's spy agencies have been dysfunctional.
The report confirms that our intelligence community was "dead wrong" in its judgments that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
But we knew that. The 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee spelled all that out for us months ago.
President Bush's election-year order creating the presidential commission (and a schedule that assured it would report well after the election) resulted in a report that blamed the agencies for "poor trade craft and poor management."
But what we needed from this commission, which was missing from previous efforts, was accountability. Unfortunately, the newest report simply ducks this question, saying it wasn't in its charter to examine how intelligence was used or misused. The public is poorly served by such dismaying timidity.
The report simply ignores the way President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser, created that environment by deciding what the facts were and saying so, repeatedly.
Perhaps an even more serious shortcoming of the report is its penchant for seeking, through organizational change, what organizational change can't fix: misjudgments, misinterpretations and mistakes.
The report suggests that erroneous conclusions on Iraq's weapons capabilities would have been made even without the political "climate" that it acknowledges. The CIA, DIA, NSA, FBI and the like "collected precious little intelligence for the analysts to analyze." Analysts "have suffered from weak leadership, insufficient training, and budget setbacks that led to the loss of our best, most senior analysts." And there aren't enough spies.
What's ultimately perplexing is the White House's continuing efforts to delay and obfuscate meaningful examination of the intelligence establishment and to water down real change.
Doesn't the president value clarity in his perception of what his enemies are up to?
