MEDIA MYTHS VS. FACTS

MYTH #3: PRESSURE ON CIA
To bolster the case for war against Saddam, did my Pentagon office or other administration policy officials pressure intelligence analysts to change their reporting?

FACTS:

My office did not exert any such pressure. Nor did any other administration officials. This matter was examined twice, by two bipartisan panels.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, in its unanimous July 2004 "Phase I" report on pre-war Iraq intelligence:

  • "did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities." 1

  • "found that none of the analysts or other people interviewed by the Committee said that they were pressured to change their conclusions related to Iraq's links to terrorism." 2

The Silberman-Robb WMD Commission, in its unanimous March 2005 report, concluded:

  • "[Intelligence] analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."

  • "[I]t was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments. "
MORE EXCERPTS.

1Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, July 9, 2004,p. 284.

2 Ibid., p. 363.

 

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