The Little Brown Reader

Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.

The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.

The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.

In this I was not alone....

...

I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.

I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."

The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.