Federal News Service
HEADLINE: NEWS CONFERENCE WITH SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D-CA) AND SENATOR RON WYDEN (D-OR)
RE: SENATE SELECT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE REPORT ON PREWAR IRAQ INTELLIGENCE
LOCATION: SENATE RADIO/TV GALLERY, THE CAPITOL, WASHINGTON, D.C.
BODY:
SEN. FEINSTEIN: Both Senator Wyden and I have been on the Intelligence Committee now for four years. We actually sit next to each other up in Room 219, and each of us has presented "additional views," which is at the end of the report. But for the purposes of today, each one of us is going to make a statement.
In my view, the bottom line of the report presented today is that the National Intelligence Estimate-which are the best judgments of America's intelligence community-as well as statements to the Congress and the American people regarding both Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as well as ties to al Qaeda were inaccurate, deeply flawed and just plain wrong.
Because Iraq was the first case of preemptive war by the United States, a very important lesson was learned. And that lesson is that preemption is a failed policy unless intelligence is substantially accurate, enough so that it is actionable. In this case, it was not.
Three important judgments made by intelligence analysts were contained in the NIE. I want to skim over them because our chairman, Senator Roberts, went through them in full.
The first, briefly, is that Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons; the second, Baghdad has begun renewed production of mustard, sarin, cyclosarin and VX; the third, production and weaponization of Iraq's offensive BW program were more advanced than they were before the Gulf War.
The bottom line is that neither the military examination of more than 1,000 priority sites nor the interim findings of Dr. David Kay and the special Iraqi Survey Group, and his successor, have found any biological or chemical elements or weapons or their deployment to battlefield commanders.
So the intelligence was both bad and wrong. And let me give you three examples.
The secretary of State was put before the world at the United Nations. He spoke at length about the presence of mobile biological warfare vans. He used four sources. He detailed those sources.
All four of those sources have been discredited.
A second instance involved the analysis of the Iraqi small unmanned aerial vehicle program, known as UAV. The Air Force analysts who had the expertise in this area said that the likely mission for the UAVs was as serial targets or for reconnaissance missions. Their analysis was ignored.
And in the third, in the review of the aluminum tubes, Department of Energy analysts, the acknowledged experts in nuclear technology, found that the aluminum tubes were not suitable for a nuclear program, and the State Department's analysts agreed. The CIA view prevailed. CIA and DIA believed the items were intended to be used for a nuclear program.
Now here's an instance where there was a clear difference between varying agencies of the American government, but there was no adequate process to reconcile the differences.
Now one of the major reasons why the prewar intelligence was both bad and wrong, I believe, were that-is actually a structural and functional failure within the intelligence community. Let me quote the report. "There was a combination of systemic weaknesses, primarily in analytic trade craft, compounded by a lack of information-sharing, poor management and inadequate intelligence collection," end quote.
I think the committee's report proves beyond all doubt that the present arrangement of collection and analysis between agencies and departments must change. The functional flaws in the intelligence community include the absence of any or adequate red teaming, which is really peer review, a procedure to reconcile differing departmental and analytical views. There were real problems in the process used to connect the dots. By this I mean that analysts were not provided adequate information about the nature of the human sources to be able to fully assess their credibility.
The committee's report does not acknowledge that the intelligence estimates were shaped by the administration. In my view, this remains an open question and needs more scrutiny.
But I will say this. Unless administration officials, from the president on down, had information not made available to the Senate Intelligence Committee, there was clearly an exaggeration of either an imminent or a grave and growing threat to the American people.
What's become really clear to me is that this great intelligence community, set up after World War II, designed really to deal with state-to-state intelligence, is not structured properly to deal in a day of non-state, asymmetric terror, which is where our intelligence needs to go today.
It was mentioned this morning that the Department of Defense Controls 80 percent of the budget, and the secretary of DOD controls a majority of the departments. It is clear that any director has to have what we call here statutary (sic) and budgetary authority over all of the agencies if you're going to set the priorities, determine the strategies, make the choices, and avoid spending huge amounts of money for naught.
So I'm very pleased to be joined by Senator Wyden, Senator Rockefeller, Senator Graham, Senator Lott, Senator Snowe, and Senator Mikulski, in a bill to create a true director of national intelligence, one that doesn't directly run one of the departments, but is totally responsible for all of the departments and would have the budgetary controls over all of the departments; the ability to set priorities, determine strategies; say, you know, for example, we're spending X for satellites; maybe some of this should be used for human intelligence. And then secondly, we're in a new world; it's asymmetric, it's a different culture. How do we bring our people up to par very quickly? What programs do we need, and where do we need these programs, in what department?
So, we have more than-the number is classified, but I think you all know what it is, we have more than a dozen departments, and no clear channel of direction. That needs to be established. And so in this bill, which Senator Roberts has committed to not only hear our bill, but hear other bills, and Senator Wyden will talk about a bill that he has, we now must look ahead and we must see that these great agencies, formed after World War II, are really restructured, redesigned, and better able to deal in this new non-state, asymmetric world of terror.
And I'll turn it over to Senator Wyden.
SEN. WYDEN: Well, thank you, Senator Feinstein. And you have brought your usual thoroughness and eloquence to this exercise, and I'm proud to be your seat mate in the committee and to be one of your original sponsors of the bill.
Given the heat, I won't take an hour and a half or so to speechify here. Let me make a couple of comments that we haven't really gotten into, and then touch on some issues from this morning.
First, I'd like to bring up-this is page 50 of the report. This is actually what came out today. And I bring this up because this is really illustrative of what we face on the Intelligence Committee, and the country faces with respect to this whole question of getting the facts out to the American people.
And so you have a sense of what has really gone on for the last six weeks, the Intelligence Committee and the CIA have been wrestling over what parts of this report would actually get made public. At the outset, the CIA was hacking and slicing and axing page after page of the report. And finally, given the public interest and public attention in this matter, we were able to wrestle a substantial portion out so that that is what all of you and the American people are going to see.
But the fact of the matter is, this is not a fair process, and it is not a process that is in the interests of the American people. It is absolutely critical that documents that need to be protected from a national security standpoint are protected. But again and again we see that a lot of times these documents are not protected for national security reasons, they're protected for political security reasons to protect individuals from embarrassment.
So Senator Lott and I next week will be introducing bipartisan legislation to create an independent national security classification board so that the issues with respect to these kinds of documents and how these documents get to the American people are based on true national security concerns and not the political concerns of some individual.
And by the way, this has happened on both sides of the aisle. This is a bipartisan dereliction of duty; it has nothing to do with Democrats and Republicans. And it needs to be changed.
A couple of additional points that I would want to mention deal with matters that came up this morning. The first deals with this question of whether the intelligence analysts were pressured into finding or putting forth certain conclusions.
Now, it is a fact that nobody came before the committee and said, "Look, I had my brains beaten in to change my analysis," but it is also true that policymakers made it very clear what information they were looking for. And I think it's especially noteworthy that administration officials repeatedly asked pointed questions of the analysts about the Saddam-al Qaeda link, because there the information didn't match the public rhetoric; however, they were not nearly as interested in questioning the basis of the analysis on the weapons of mass destruction information, because there the flawed analysis matched what they wanted to say. So I think it's important that we put this question of pressure into the proper context.
Second, in my view there was a consistent pattern of exaggeration, certainly with respect to the Saddam-al Qaeda connection. The exaggeration there, the report finds that the intelligence community did not find any clear evidence that there was a cooperative relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam despite continual assertions to the contrary by senior administration official.
Finally, it seems to me that with respect to the days ahead, this is not primarily going to be a question of money. This is going to be a question of making sure that the analysis gets done right, that we set in place management practices that prevent the "group think" that the committee documented today, and that first and foremost, there is accountability.
I want to close by saying that I think that for the committee and for the country, the heavy lifting is in the days ahead. We essentially laid out today on a bipartisan basis our facts and our conclusions with respect to the intelligence-gathering process. What we did not get into is the use of that intelligence.
And I will tell you I believe that with respect to how the intelligence was used, an independent inquiry would show that the way it was used was very troubling. Again and again, whether it was by linking 9/11 and Saddam and the war on Iraq, again and again what you saw was the intelligence was essentially used as a rationale, as a kind of trampoline to go to war, despite the factual evidence indicating that the threat was not imminent. Jul 09, 2004 15:07 ET .EOF
So I bring this up last by way of saying that I think it is absolutely imperative that the second part of our report come out before the election. The American people have a right to know how that faulty intelligence was used. The reason why is because bad intelligence and bad policy are not mutually exclusive. You can have both. And I happen to think that's what you had here. You had faulty intelligence that was then independently compounded by an administration looking for every conceivable rationale for going to war.
So a lot of people in Washington are betting that part two of this report won't come out before the election. I just hope that the Congress insist that it does, that all of you and others are aware that the heavy lifting for the committee is still ahead, and we have got to get that second part that deals with how intelligence was used out.
And one of the things that I've been able to work out with Senator Feinstein is any difficult questions you give to her; any softball questions you can give to me, but let's --
SEN. FEINSTEIN: Thanks, Ron.
Q Back in February when the committee made the decision that they wanted to break up the report into two parts, how does that happen? Because basically, the committee decided-if I remember correctly, unanimously-they wanted to put the use of the intelligence into phase two and thereby delaying it, and basically dropping it into the middle of an election cycle. Number one, do you think there was outside pressure, political pressure, from the White House to do that? And is there any way to get that done before the election?
SEN. FEINSTEIN: Well, I'll answer it in my way and then Senator Wyden will.
The decision was clearly made at the committee-certainly the chairman of the committee felt very strongly-and that it should be two phases: the first would be the findings and the conclusions, based on those findings; and then the second would be the use. Unfortunately, it took much longer. As you can see, the report is very thorough. The staff has really done a fine, fine job, and it's much later, I think, than anyone on the committee would have liked to have seen. We had a lot of discussion about it.
There are many of us that would have liked to see-have seen them both come out together, but that view didn't prevail.
SEN. WYDEN: It was really a question of basic math. We didn't have the votes in order to have them both come out together. I think it would have been in the public interest to have it come out together, and it was just that simple. I will also say, though, that between now and November there is ample time to get this out. There is ample time to make sure that the two are linked.
And again, Senator Feinstein and I have spent a lot of time, both on the committee and in our work in the Senate, trying to be bipartisan. You've heard us talking about two pieces of legislation, the question of a director and the legislation Senator Lott and I are pursuing. Unfortunately, you cannot drain, at this time of the year, politics out of anything, and nobody's naive and suggests otherwise. I do think that it is so important to the country that this question of how the intelligence was used that we've got to find a way to get this out. And I think if people understand first that it's doable and how important it is, we'll get it out before November.
SEN. FEINSTEIN: Ed Epstein of the Chronicle.
Q Senator, what's your opinion about this? Should it be before the elections?
SEN. FEINSTEIN: Oh, yes. I agree with Senator Wyden.
Yes, sir.
Q What's your impression of the committee's report, their work, the status? How complete are they in the findings of how it was used? Fifty percent, 60 (percent)? I mean, do they have a lot of work to go or not much work to go?
SEN. FEINSTEIN: I think the great bulk of the work has been done; I think probably 80 percent or more there. The rest is just taking these findings and really the findings and relating them to how they were used by the administration. And that's pretty easy to do because you have the statements made publicly, and those statements had to have been based on intelligence.
The only, I think, question mark in all of this is there-are there things that the administration saw that we didn't see? I mean, we know the president receives a daily brief that we don't see. Otherwise, if there are any other items that they have received that we don't have, that will have to be brought out in this study.
SEN. WYDEN: There's one other point on this question of the next round ahead for the committee and how the intelligence was used. You simply cannot have accountability unless you get the second part of the report out. In other words, everybody has been talking, well, so- and-so has been absolved; it's really the fault of this sector and not the fault of that sector. The whole point of the second stage of the report is to get the accountability that the American people are asking for.
Again and again they've said, well, we've heard for years-I mean, literally all of you can go look at your LexisNexis and you can see intelligence failures going back, you know, certainly two decades. There are remarkable parallels between reports that highlight intelligence failures.
The question is whether this time there's going to be anything different and whether there's going to be accountability and whether, in the future, people like yourselves and members of the Intelligence Committee don't have to spend weeks and weeks trying to keep most of our reports from looking like that, because I can tell you, if it wasn't for the public attention and public visibility that we have been able to put on this issue, a good chunk of the report, in my opinion, would have ended up with huge sections blacked out. And you got a page from the report right there.
SEN. FEINSTEIN: Let me say one other thing about this. A National Intelligence Estimate is the assessment of the entire intelligence community, not just CIA or DIA or NIMA or Defense or State or any of the others, the whole community.
Many of us on the committee, because we receive fragmentary bits and pieces-you might call them dots-wanted to have this intelligence estimate. And so we all pressed for the intelligence estimate, because there were too many kind of dots out there, and it was very difficult to know what to make of them.
At the same time, there was this-when-the administration clearly had made up its mind that they wanted to go to war in Iraq, and Congress had to authorize use of force. So this makes it a very special document.
For those on the committee, I mean, we scrutinized and re- scrutinized. We read and we re-read, because we had to cast a vote based on whether we thought there was immediate harm to our nation possible. And based on the intelligence, a vote was taken, certainly in the Senate, a vote by 77 United States senators.
I think-and I'm speaking specifically about my vote-that yes, based on these-this intelligence, there was a real threat. A UAV could be smuggled into the country-we knew about our loose borders-and filled with a biological or chemical warhead and set loose in this country. Weaponized biological and chemical weapons were probably deployed and could be used within 45 minutes. The missiles had exceeded United States-excuse me-U.N. regulations. Well, we didn't know whether they could put a chemical or biological warhead on, but you could make that assumption if things had been weaponized.
So the words used had a specific public policy application that was the most serious of any public policy application. And that's what makes this such a critical juncture in our history.
And again, I've been amazed at how much in the intelligence culture resists change. This-these institutions were set up following World War II. You had the Soviet Union. You had the United States, the KGB. You had the CIA. You had a whole different kind of intelligence need than you have today, based on shadowy groups that speak a very different language, that have a very different set of values and cultures, which have to be permeated.
And the fact was we had these reports and we had no real agents, for the most part, on the ground in Iraq from 1998 on. And that's, I think, something we don't want to let happen again. So-and the only way I can look at this and see it not happening again is if you can take this whole community and give it the direction and set the priorities for it. I mean, we know we're deficit in human intelligence. How do we bring it up to par? What kind of training programs are put on? Where should those training programs be? This is all part of the job that we have to do.
Now, much in the culture militates against oversight. And yet we have a responsibility to provide that oversight. And it's difficult because it's not like another traditional group of agencies within our government.
Q It's reported that President Bush is preparing to send up a nominee for CIA director. Given the blunt nature of today's report and the failure to have this second part of the report, is there any nominee, no matter who he nominates, is that person going to be able to even get a vote in the Senate?
SEN. WYDEN: Those confirmation hearings will be some of the most important that we've had in the Congress in a long, long time, because that's where we can talk, for example, about whether or not you're going to make changes, or whether after public attention, you know, lapses and people move on to something else, it's business as usual.
That's why I highlighted, we have had reports about intelligence failures again and again for the last couple of decades. One of the things I find very attractive about Senator Feinstein's legislation is that I think it will force people who really have for a variety of reasons been unwilling to work together, it will force them to realize that they're on the same team, and essentially all of them will be held accountable if they don't work together.
But I also believe that no matter what the Congress puts down on a piece of paper-and I happen to think Senator Feinstein's bill makes a lot of sense; what Senator Lott and I will be introducing makes a lot of sense-at the end of the day, if you don't have leadership at the top that's going to bring about these changes, all the laws on the books aren't going to matter.
So the point of these confirmation hearings-and I was one who urged that we have an appointee sent up to the Congress. I don't think a caretaker is enough, given the circumstances we're in. Those confirmation hearings are some of the most important that have been held in the Congress in a long time, and the point of them is to set in place the kind of leadership that's going to keep this from happening again.
SEN. FEINSTEIN: If I might add, Ed, I would really urge the administration to go slow, because we're at a very critical point. This report is now out. There is more that has to come. We've got to solidify a country that wants reform and structural change in our intelligence community. And I think it's premature to move. We've got a competent acting director right now. I think Senator Wyden is correct, this is going to be a very difficult nomination battle right at this particular point in time because this has to be a very special and unique person. And I think none of us knows quite who can fill those big shoes right now.
Q How can the Democrats avoid appearing obstructionist if they question too severely a nominee?
SEN. FEINSTEIN: Well, all I'm saying is-I don't think they can. But all I'm saying is, let's go slow. Let's look at where we are. We're the oversight committees, the House, the Senate. Give us an opportunity to move with some of the reforms; this is the next part; and then once you make the reforms, I think, have the person that you think is best apt to carry those reforms out.
SEN. WYDEN: You have two senators who have talked probably at a greater length than you want about bipartisan legislation today. Two specific bills, two Democrats, two Republicans, trying to lay the groundwork for fundamental changes. I think the point of those hearings is to stick to the facts. We've got a bipartisan report out, every member of the committee, and there are certainly some pretty diverging political philosophies on the Senate Intelligence Committee. And I think the point of the hearings is to do the job right and to make sure that this time it's different and that when people look back on this period, it's not like us looking back two decades at three or four past intelligence reports that gathered a lot of dust but no real change took place.
SEN. FEINSTEIN: I guess that's it. Thank you.
SEN. WYDEN: Thank you.
SEN. FEINSTEIN: Thank you very much.