Reply #86: Correction: He got to read it TWICE

[Adelante]

Transcript

American Enterprise Institute

September 7, 2006

-snip

And I want to talk about the national intelligence estimate on Iraq that was submitted to the Congress in secret on October 1, 2002, about 10 days before the vote on whether or not we should authorize the President to go to war in Iraq. That NIE, portions of which have since been declassified after the war, of course had the views of all the US intelligence agencies about what was known and what was not known about Iraq weapons of mass destruction. And if you forgive me I’m just going to do a very short reading of one portion of the book, in which we highlight what happened when that NIE went up to Congress.

We talked to - this is a passage that deals with the recollections of Peter Zimmerman, who was the scientific adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who is eagerly awaiting the NIE because he thought this was a crucial document that was important to the debate on Iraq. And as soon as he could, Peter Zimmerman the scientific adviser rushed to the US capital to read the CIA’s classified NIE on Iraq weapons of mass destruction. He read the NIE twice. He was, he later said, astonished. The document offered bold and definitive conclusions in its key judgments. Iraq, it said, “has chemical and biological weapons” and is “reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” But the actual evidence, he thought, was hardly overpowering.

Deeper in the NIE there was information that undercut those dark conclusions on critical points - the aluminum tubes, the unmanned aerial drums, the nuclear program. Some government agencies had argued that the NIE was wrong. “The dissents left out. They are in bold, almost like flashing lights they are called.” He had read on NIEs before and never seemed to sense as striking as these. I remember thinking he later said, “Boy, there is nothing there. If anybody takes the time to actually read this, they cannot believe there actually are major WMD programs.”

Well, that was classified information submitted to the Congress on the eve of the vote, and yet it would have been a federal crime for Peter Zimmerman to call me up, or call Stuart up, or any other member of the news media and tell them, “Do you know this document we just got has striking dissents on key portions from major US intelligence agencies?” Now maybe somebody can articulate a reason why the dissenting views of key US intelligence agencies on major questions of war and peace should not be shared with the American public, but I’m hard-put to see what the harm to national security would have been.

I do know that had there been a full disclosure of that, had somebody leaked the NIE prior to the vote, it would have certainly caused a major ruckus. It would have certainly gotten a lot of attention, and I would argue it would have contributed substantially to a healthy and honest democratic debate about whether the United States government should take this consequential decision of going to war in Iraq.

http://www.aei.org/events/filter.all,eventID.1383/transcript.asp