Buck Doesn’t Stop at This President’s Desk

by Helen Thomas

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan says President Bush was "pleased" with the latest investigation that blames CIA analysts for the false information that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

That’s the reason Bush invaded Iraq, remember? Once again it’s those low-level bureaucrats who took us into war. And once again a panel of "don’t rock the boat" establishment figures has let the commander in chief off the hook.

I asked McClellan if the president was upset to be so misguided and at such a human cost. Well, you had to be there.

He danced around on the subject, talked about "a culture in the intelligence community that had not adapted to meet the threats that we face today." But he could not be pinned down on how the president personally felt about making war on the basis of bum information.

Any other president would have blown his stack. Instead, Bush honored former CIA Director George Tenet with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The commission assigned to inquire into the intelligence failures was headed by Laurence Silberman, a conservative Republican and retired member of the D.C. U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, with former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb as co-chairman.

Their report did not deal with how the policy-makers used the intelligence or what questions they were asking the intelligence agencies to answer. Bush had carefully limited the commission’s mandate to steer clear of such potential embarrassments.

The report said, "The analysts who worked on the Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."

Gee, those analysts must have been living on Mars. Reporters covering the daily White House news briefings at the end of 2001 and during 2002 knew that war was on the agenda. They heard over and over again that there had to be a regime change in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein possessed vast arsenals of lethal weapons and posed a threat to the United States. The reporters wrote and broadcast the White House line. It became the conventional wisdom.

Perhaps it was that incessant drumbeat from the White House that led the panel to note: "It is hard to deny that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom."

While Bush apparently has no personal reaction about being misinformed, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wasn’t so shy. Powell got caught out on the limb with his thumping presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003 — one month before the invasion of Iraq — when he described in gripping detail Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons.

More recently, Powell told the German magazine Stern that he was "furious and angry" that he had been misinformed about Iraq’s weapons stockpile.

He said he had based his U.N. presentation on information "from our security services and from some Europeans, including Germans."

"Some of this information was wrong," Powell said. "I did not know this at the time."

The panel called the whole escapade "one of the most public and damaging intelligence failures on record in American history." U.S. intelligence agencies were "dead wrong" in their pre-war assessment of Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons." And the information on Iraq was "either worthless or misleading" and its analysis riddled with errors."

Nor was the White House about to listen to Hans Blix, who formerly headed the U.N. inspection teams that went into Iraq between November 2002 and March 2003. The commission said the Bush administration and the intelligence community routinely dismissed the U.N. reports — based on 700 inspections — that the Iraqi stockpiles apparently had been destroyed before the U.S. attack.

So who is accountable? Bush and his top aides see the 2004 election as vindication for the president. End of story.

Harry Truman got it wrong — the buck never stops at this White House. Instead, it’s those nameless, faceless bureaucrats who led us down the garden path.

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.

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