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Abstract
The 2003 Iraq prewar intelligence failure was not simply a case of the U.S. intelligence community providing flawed data to policy-makers. It also involved subversion of the competitive intelligence analysis process, where unofficial intelligence boutiques “stovepiped” misleading intelligence assessments directly to policy-makers and undercut intelligence community input that ran counter to the White House's preconceived preventive war of choice against Iraq. This essay locates historical precursors to such “Team B intelligence coups” in the original 1976 Team B exercise and the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission report on ballistic missile threats. Since competitive intelligence analysis exercises are designed to improve decision-making by institutionalizing the learning function of debate, their dynamics stand to be elucidated through critique informed by argumentation theory. Such inquiry has salience in the current political milieu, where intelligence reform efforts and the investigations that drive them tend to sidestep the Team B intelligence coup phenomenon.
Acknowledgments
For helping percolate ideas expressed in this article, sincere thanks are due to members of the Schenley Park Debate Authors Working Group (DAWG), members of the Ridgway Center for International Security Studies Working Group on Preemptive and Preventive Military Intervention, those attending a panel on public argument and U.S. security policy at the 13th Alta Argumentation Conference, anonymous reviewers for this journal, and editor David Henry.
Notes
1. United States, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2004).
2. The Sancho Panza reference is made in Anthony Cordesman, The 9/11 Commission Report: Strengths and Weaknesses, Center for Strategic and International Studies Issue Briefing, August 2, 2004, http://www.csis.org/features/911commission.pdf, 3 (accessed June 17, 2005).
3. The “intelligence community” is “a federation of executive branch agencies and organizations that work separately and together to conduct intelligence activities necessary for the conduct of foreign relations and the protection of the national security of the United States.” It includes the following entities: Air Force Intelligence; Army Intelligence; Central Intelligence Agency; Coast Guard Intelligence; Defense Intelligence Agency; Department of Energy; Department of Homeland Security; Department of State; Department of the Treasury; Drug Enforcement Administration; Federal Bureau of Investigation; Marine Corps Intelligence; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; National Reconnaissance Office; National Security Agency; and Navy Intelligence. See the United States Intelligence Community website, http://www.intelligence.gov/1-members.shtml (accessed May 7, 2006).
4. See Congressional Record, December 7, 2004, pp. H10930–H10993. For background analysis see Richard A. Posner, Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Michael A. Turner, “Intelligence Reform and the Politics of Entrenchment,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 18 (2005): 383–97; and Joshua Rovner and Austin Long, “The Perils of Shallow Theory: Intelligence Reform and the 9/11 Commission,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 18 (2005): 609–37.
5. Cordesman, 9/11 Commission Report, 3.
6. The Silberman-Robb Commission's charge, as spelled out in President Bush's February 6, 2004 executive order, was to investigate the U.S. “intelligence community,” which the order defines operationally as the set of official intelligence entities within the U.S. federal government. Notably, intelligence boutiques such as the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG) and its offshoot entity the Office of Special Plans (OSP) fall outside of this definition and hence were not covered in the commission's report. See United States, Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Report to the President, March 2005, http://www.wmd.gov/report/ (accessed April 12, 2005); George W. Bush, Executive Order, Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, February 6, 2004, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040206-10.html (accessed March 14, 2004). The scope of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's initial investigation of the Iraq prewar intelligence failure (completed in July 2004) was similarly circumscribed, focusing only on activities within the official intelligence community. A “Phase II” component of that investigation was scheduled to probe PCTEG and OSP's role in the intelligence failure, but it proved extremely difficult for the committee to complete work on this portion of its investigation. One major sticking point involved access to documents and witnesses related to the intelligence activity of Pentagon deputy Douglas Feith and others associated with PCTEG and OSP. Democrats pushed for information on these subjects, but were denied by committee chairperson Senator Pat Roberts (R-KA). See United States, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, July 7, 2004, http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf (accessed July 21, 2004); Paul Kerr, “Three Years Later, Iraq Investigations Continue,” Arms Control Today (April 2006), http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2006_04/iraqinvestcont.asp (accessed April 21, 2006); and Letter by John D. Rockefeller IV, Carl Levin, and Dianne Feinstein to Bill Frist and Harry Reid, November 14, 2005, http://thinkprogress.org/wp-images/upload/intel_letter.pdf (accessed March 16, 2006).
7. U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Prewar Assessments, 307.
8. Mark M. Lowenthal, U.S. Intelligence: Evolution and Anatomy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 47–9.
9. Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, 2nd ed. (London: Brassey's, 1993), 80; cf. Kevin P. Stack, “A Negative View of Competitive Analysis,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 10 (Winter 1997–8): 456–64.
10. Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions (Dordrecht: Foris, 1984); Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, A Systematic Theory of Argumentation: The Pragma-dialectical Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, Analysing Complex Argumentation: The Reconstruction of Multiple and Coordinatively Compound Argumentation in a Critical Discussion (Amsterdam: SicSat, 1992).
11. Trudy Govier, A Practical Study of Argument, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1992); Ralph H. Johnson, Manifest Rationality: A Pragmatic Theory of Argument (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000); and Douglas N. Walton, Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
12. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1969); Charles A. Willard, A Theory of Argumentation (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1989).
13. Douglas Ehninger and Wayne Brockriede, Decision by Debate, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 13. For an earlier rendering of the same set of principles, see Douglas Ehninger and Wayne Brockriede, Decision by Debate (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1963), 15; see also Douglas Ehninger, “Decision by Debate: A Re-Examination,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 45 (1959): 282–7; Douglas Ehninger, “Argument as Method: Its Nature, its Limitations and its Uses,” Speech Monographs 37 (1970): 101–10.
14. See Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue (New York: Random House, 1998).
15. See van Eemeren and Grootendorst, Speech Acts, 119–23; Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 28–31.
16. Shulsky and Schmitt, Silent Warfare, 80.
17. Willard C. Matthias, America's Strategic Blunders (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).
18. Robert P. Newman, “Communication Pathologies of Intelligence Systems,” Speech Monographs 42 (1975): 273–90.
19. Peter R. Neumann and M. L. R. Smith, “Missing the Plot? Intelligence and Discourse Failure,” Orbis (Winter 2005): 95–107.
20. Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War,” International Security 29 (Summer 2004): 5–48.
21. Examples of such “downstream” analyses include Stephen J. Hartnett and Laura A. Stengrim, Globalization and Empire: The U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and the Twilight of Democracy (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006); G. Thomas Goodnight, “Strategic Doctrine, Public Debate and the Terror War,” in Hitting First: Preventive Force in U.S. Security Strategy, ed. William W. Keller and Gordon R. Mitchell (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 93–114; Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America's War on Terror (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005); Deepa Kumar, “Media, War, and Propaganda: Strategies of Information Management During the 2003 Iraq War,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (March 2006): 48–69; and Carol K. Winkler, In the Name of Terrorism: Presidents on Political Violence in the Post-World War II Era (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006).
22. G. Thomas Goodnight, “The Re-Union of Argumentation and Debate Theory,” in Dimensions of Argument: Proceedings of the Second Summer Conference on Argument, ed. George Ziegelmueller and Jack Rhodes (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1981), 415–31.
23. Joseph W. Wenzel, “Three Perspectives on Argument: Rhetoric, Dialectic, Logic,” in Perspectives on Argumentation: Essays in Honor of Wayne Brockriede, ed. Janice Schuetz and Robert Trapp (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1990), 9–26.
24. This Team B exercise tasked three separate groups of outside analysts to assess intelligence in the areas of Soviet low-altitude air defense capabilities, Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) accuracy, and Soviet strategic policy and objectives. The exchanges on this latter issue yielded the most divisive and influential argumentation and hence receive the bulk of my critical attention.
25. United States Central Intelligence Agency, Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis: Soviet Strategic Objectives, an Alternate View: Report of Team “B” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976). Declassified September 16, 1992.
26. Anne Hessing Cahn and John Prados, “Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 49 (April 1993): 22–31.
27. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Intelligence Community Experiment.
28. On the key players responsible for shaping and implementing NSC-68, see Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969); Robert P. Newman, “NSC (National Insecurity) 68: Nitze's Second Hallucination,” in Critical Reflections on the Cold War, ed. Martin. J. Medhurst and H. W. Brands (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2000), 55–94; and Steven Casey, “Selling NSC-68: The Truman Administration, Public Opinion, and the Politics of Mobilization, 1950–51,” Diplomatic History 29 (September 2005): 655–90. Regarding the historical connection between NSC-68 and Team B, see Gordon R. Mitchell and Robert P. Newman, “By ‘Any Measures’ Necessary: NSC-68 and Cold War Roots of the 2002 National Security Strategy,” in Keller and Mitchell, Hitting First, 70–90.
29. For example, see Michael A. Gilbert, Coalescent Argumentation (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997).
30. Sidney Graybeal, quoted in Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Détente: The Right Attacks the CIA (College Station, PA: Penn State University Press, 1998), 158.
31. Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 251.
32. Donald P. Steury, ed., Intentions and Capabilities: Estimates on Soviet Strategic Forces, 1950–1983 (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1996), 335.
33. Ray Cline, quoted in Matthias, America's Strategic Blunders, 305–6.
34. Murray Marder, “Carter to Inherit Intense Dispute on Soviet Intentions,” Washington Post, January 2, 1977, p. A1.
35. Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983), 199–200.
36. Richard Lehman, quoted in Richard Kovar, “An Interview with Richard Lehman,” Studies in Intelligence 9 (Summer 2000): http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/summer00/art05.html (accessed June 5, 2003).
37. Gary Hart, “Separate Opinion,” The National Intelligence Estimates A-B Team Episode Concerning Soviet Strategic Capability and Objectives, Committee Print, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Subcommittee on Collection, Production, and Quality (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1978), 8.
38. Hart, “Separate Opinion,” 7.
39. Fareed Zakaria, “Exaggerating the Threats,” Newsweek, June 16, 2003, p. 33; see also Cahn, Killing Détente, 192–6.
40. Frank Gaffney, “Second Opinion on Defense,” Washington Times, May 8, 1990, p. F2.
41. William Safire, “Needed: A ‘Team B,’” New York Times, March 10, 1994, p. 25.
42. Paul Wolfowitz, quoted in Jack Davis, “The Challenge of Managing Uncertainty: Paul Wolfowitz on Intelligence-policy Relations,” Studies in Intelligence 39 (1996): http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/96unclass/davis.htm (accessed July 14, 2003).
43. I am indebted to Janne Nolan for pointing out that it may be more appropriate to call the Rumsfeld Commission a “Team C,” given that it was created after an earlier Team B entity, the Gates Commission on Intelligence Assessments of Ballistic Missile Threats, produced findings that largely corroborated extant CIA estimates of the ballistic missile threat posed to the U.S.
44. Floyd D. Spence, “Prepared Statement,” Hearing on the Report of the Commission on the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, United States House of Representatives, National Security Committee, July 16, 1998, Federal News Service, Lexis-Nexis Congressional Database, http://www.lexis-nexis.com (accessed August 14, 2004).
45. Michael Dobbs reports on part of the commission's methodology for generating the five year figure:
According to commission members, the five-year estimate was based largely on briefings from missile engineers at major U.S. defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The commission asked the American rocket builders how long it would take them to build an ICBM, from the starting point of a Third World country such as Iran.
Michael Dobbs, “How Politics Helped Redefine Threat,” Washington Post, January 14, 2002, p. A1.
46. Phyllis Schlafly, “ABM Should Be Republicans’ Unifying Issue,” Eagle Forum Column (November 1998), http://www.eagleforum.org/column/1998/nov98-11-11.html (accessed April 4, 1999).
47. As Robert Reich observes, “Reagan's decision to emphasize nuclear defense as well as nuclear offense can be seen as growing out of the debate caused by Team B. . . . SDI would not have developed without the arguments embodied in reports like Team B's.” Robert C. Reich, “Re-examining the Team A–Team B Exercise,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 3 (Fall 1989): 391.
48. See John Holum's comments in Tom Raum, “GOP, Democrats Agree on Defense,” Associated Press News Feed, June 29, 1999, Lexis-Nexis All News database, http://www.lexis-nexis.com (accessed April 4, 1999).
49. Greg Thielmann, “Rumsfeld Reprise? The Missile Report that Foretold the Iraq Intelligence Controversy,” Arms Control Today (July/August 2003): 3.
50. See Thielmann, “Rumsfeld Reprise?,” 3–8.
51. Quoted in Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 25.
52. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking Press, 2004), 234–8; Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies (New York: Free Press, 2004), 264–5; and U.S. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report, 335–6.
53. Sunday Times (U.K.), “The Secret Downing Street Memo,” May 1, 2005, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html (accessed June 3, 2005). According to National Security Archive Senior Fellow John Prados, the Dearlove memo makes clear, “with stunning clarity,” that “the goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein was set at least a year in advance,” and that “President Bush's repeated assertions that no decision had been made about attacking Iraq were plainly false.” John Prados, “Iraq: When was the Die Cast?” Tom Paine Commentary, May 3, 2005, http://www.tompaine.com/articles/iraq_when_was_the_die_cast.php (accessed June 3, 2005).
54. U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Prewar Assessments, 307.
55. George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005), 106.
56. Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies Paper, July 8, 1996, http://www.aaiusa.org/news/must_read_feith.htm (accessed August 14, 2004).
57. Michael Maloof, quoted in James Risen, “How Pair's Finding on Terror Led to Clash on Shaping Intelligence,” New York Times, April 28, 2004, p. A1; see also James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006), 61–85.
58. Packer, Assassins’ Gate, 107.
59. Quoted in U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Prewar Assessments, 308, emphasis mine.
60. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 165.
61. Quoted in U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Prewar Assessments, 309.
62. See U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Prewar Assessments, 307.
63. James E. Steiner, “Overview,” in Challenging the Red Line Between Intelligence and Policy,” Georgetown University Institute for the Study of Diplomacy Report, 2004, http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/sfs/programs/isd/redline.pdf, 1 (accessed September 16, 2004).
64. In January 2006, Newsweek obtained and published original images of several declassified slides presented during PCTEG briefings. See “Iraq and al Qaeda Selected Slides from a 2002 Briefing Prepared by the Pentagon,” Newsweek, January 2, 2006, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10652305/site/newsweek/ (accessed March 21, 2006); see also U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Prewar Assessments, 309.
65. Mark Hosenball, “9/11: A Special White House Slide Show,” Newsweek, January 4, 2006, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10663343/site/newsweek/ (accessed March 21, 2006). More generally, the substance of PCTEG claims sharply contradicted intelligence reporting by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which warned in a February 2002 document that it was possible that Libyan detainee Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a key PCTEG source, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers” regarding alleged Iraq–al-Qaida ties (DIA's analysis proved correct—al-Libi later recanted). “Just imagine,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) said, “the public impact of that DIA conclusion if it had been disclosed at the time. It surely could have made a difference in the congressional vote authorizing the war.” See United States, Defense Intelligence Agency, DITSUM #044-02 (February 2002), declassified in Kathleen P. Turner, Letter to Hon. John Rockefeller, October 26, 2005; Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, “Al Libi's Tall Tales,” Newsweek, November 10, 2005, Web exclusive, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9991919/site/newsweek/ (accessed May 6, 2006); and Walter Pincus, “Newly Released Data Undercut Prewar Claims Source Tying Baghdad, Al Qaeda Doubted,” Washington Post, November 6, 2005, p. A22.
66. James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 290.
67. Benjamin and Simon, The Next Attack, 170.
A group of civilians under the direction of Douglas Feith and William Luti was culling through raw data on Saddam's possible ties to al-Qaeda in order to produce the desired result that the established intelligence community, including the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, would not provide (Packer, Assasins’ Gate, 62).
68. U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Prewar Assessments, 309.
69. Quoted in U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Prewar Assessments, 309.
70. Carl Levin, Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis of the Issue of an Iraq–al Qaeda Relationship, October 21, 2004, http://www.levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2004/102104inquiryreport.pdf (accessed December 3, 2005), 24.
71. Levin, Alternative Analysis, 22–3.
72. Ehninger and Brockriede, Decision by Debate, 2nd ed., 13.
73. U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Prewar Assessments, 310.
74. Memorandum of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, quoted in U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Prewar Assessments, 311.
75. See exchange between Senator Levin and DCI Tenet, Future Worldwide Threats to U.S. National Security, Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, March 9, 2004, Lexis/Nexis Congressional Database, http://www.lexis-nexis.com (accessed August 8, 2004).
76. Georgetown University, Challenging the Red Line, 5.
77. Greg Thielmann, personal communication to Gordon Mitchell, Pittsburgh, PA, July 16, 2004.
78. Shulsky and Schmitt, Silent Warfare, 80.
79. For details on the efforts of Bolton's office to acquire control of Secure Compartmented Information Facilities in State Department offices, see Alex Bolton, “Report Could Hurt Bolton,” The Hill, May 11, 2005, http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/thehill/news/frontpage/051105/report.html (accessed June 15, 2005); Henry Waxman, Letter to Christopher Shays, March 1, 2005, http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/documents/20050301112122-90349.pdf (accessed June 15, 2005); and United States, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Interview of Ms. DeSutter with Regard to the Bolton Nomination, May 5, 2005, http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/desutter%20interview.pdf (accessed June 15, 2005).
80. Kenneth M. Pollack, “Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong,” The Atlantic Monthly (January/February 2004): 88–90; see also Benjamin and Simon, The Next Attack, 167–74; Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 203–48; and W. Patrick Lang, “Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy 11 (Summer 2004): 49–53.
81. Pollack, “Spies, Lies and Weapons,” 8. On the role played by the White House Information Group in systematically publicizing such B-Teamed intelligence, see Bamford, Pretext for War, 317–31.
82. Stephen J. Hartnett and Laura A. Stengrim, “‘The Whole Operation of Deception’: Reconstructing President Bush's Rhetoric of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies 4 (2004): 178.
83. Paul Wolfowitz, prepared testimony, Joint Inquiry Hearing on Counterterrorist Center Customer Perspective, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, September 19, 2002, http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2002/s20020919-depsecdef1.html (accessed March 14, 2004).
84. Greg Thielmann, quoted in Sidney Blumenthal, “There Was No Failure of Intelligence: U.S. Spies Were Ignored, or Worse, if they Failed to Make the Case for War,” The Guardian (U.K.), February 5, 2004, p. 26.
85. Such doubts were communicated directly to President Bush in the one-page October 2002 President's Summary of the NIE, which indicated that although “most agencies judge” that the use of the aluminum tubes was “related to a uranium enrichment effort . . . INR and DOE believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons uses.” Murray Waas reports that the one-page summary was written specifically for Bush, was handed to the president by then-CIA Director George Tenet, and was read in Tenet's presence. See Murray Waas, “What Bush was Told About Iraq,” National Journal, March 2, 2006, http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0302nj1.htm (accessed May 2, 2006).
86. Statement by Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet on the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, CIA Press Release, August 11, 2003, http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/press_release/2003/pr08112003.htm (accessed March 18, 2004).
87. Jonathan S. Landay, “Doubts, Dissent Stripped from Public Version of Iraq Assessment,” Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services, February 10, 2004, http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/special_packages/iraq/intelligence/11901380.htm (accessed May 6, 2006); see also John Prados, Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (New York: New Press, 2004), 32–93; Patrick J. Fitzgerald, “Government's Response to Defendant's Third Motion to Compel Discovery,” United States v. Libby, filed April 5, 2006, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Case No. 05-394 (RBW); and David E. Sanger and David Barstow, “Iraq Findings Leaked by Aide Were Disputed,” New York Times, April 9, 2006, p. 1.
88. See Greg Thielmann, “Intelligence in Preventive Military Strategy,” in Keller and Mitchell, Hitting First, 153–74.
89. Cahn and Prados, “Team B.”
90. Cahn, Killing Détente.
91. Reich, “Team A–Team B Exercise.”
92. Thielmann, “Rumsfeld Reprise?,” 3.
93. Joseph Cirincione, Jessica T. Mathews, and George Perkovich (with Alexis Orton), WMD in Iraq Evidence and Implications (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004); Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation”; Rodger A. Payne, “Deliberate Before Striking First?” in Keller and Mitchell, Hitting First, 115–36; and Prados, Hoodwinked.
94. U.S. Commission on Intelligence Capabilities, Report to the President, 170. Section 1017 of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 also calls for a redoubled commitment to “red team” intelligence analysis as a key reform plank. See Congressional Record, December 7, 2004, pp. H10930–H10993.
95. John A. Kringen, “How We've Improved Intelligence; Minimizing the Risk of ‘Groupthink’,” Washington Post, April 3, 2006, p. A19.
96. Douglas Hart and Steven Simon, “Thinking Straight and Talking Straight: Problems of Intelligence Analysis,” Survival 48 (Spring 2006): 50.
97. On “groupthink,” see Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1972).
98. George Tenet, quoted in “George Tenet Delivers Remarks on Intelligence Gathering and Iraq's WMD programs,” February 5, 2004, Federal Document Clearing House Transcripts, Lexis-Nexis Congressional Database, http://www.lexis-nexis.com (accessed August 13, 2004).
99. George Tenet, response to question by Carl Levin, Future Worldwide Threats to U.S. National Security, Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, March 9, 2004, Federal News Service, Lexis-Nexis Congressional Database, http://www.lexis-nexis.com (accessed August 13, 2004).
100. Paul Pillar recommends one institutional reform that could bolster the proclivity of analysts to correct official mischaracterizations of intelligence reporting by political leaders:
On this point, the United States should emulate the United Kingdom, where discussion of this issue has been more forthright, by declaring once and for all that its intelligence services should not be part of public advocacy of policies still under debate. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Tony Blair accepted a commission of inquiry's conclusions that intelligence and policy had been improperly commingled in such exercises as the publication of the ‘dodgy dossier,’ the British counterpart to the United States' Iraqi WMD white paper, and that in the future there should be a clear delineation between intelligence and policy. An American declaration should take the form of a congressional resolution and be seconded by a statement from the White House. Although it would not have legal force, such a statement would discourage future administrations from attempting to pull the intelligence community into policy advocacy. It would also give some leverage to intelligence officers in resisting any such future attempts.
Paul R. Pillar, “Intelligence, Policy and the War in Iraq,” Foreign Affairs 85 (March 2006): 13–28.
101. Dafna Linzer, “Iran is Judged 10 Years from Nuclear Bomb,” New York Times, August 2, 2005, p. A1. Following disclosures that Iran resumed uranium enrichment in 2006, experts posited a “highly uncertain,” worst-case, timeline that estimates 2009 as the earliest date that Iran could conceivably acquire a nuclear weapon. David Albright and Corey Hinderstein, Iran's Next Steps: Final Tests and the Construction of a Uranium Enrichment Plant, Institute for Science and International Security Issue Brief, January 12, 2006, http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/irancascade.pdf (accessed May 8, 2006). For additional commentary on the technical obstacles likely to delay any Iranian effort to develop nuclear weapons, see Jeffrey Lewis and Paul Kerr's informative Web log, http://www.armscontrolwonk.com.
102. Curt Weldon, Countdown to Terror (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005), 5.
103. Alexander H. Montgomery, “Ringing in Proliferation: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb Network,” International Security 30 (2005): 153–87; see also Ashton Carter and Stephen A. LaMontagne, “A Fuel-cycle Fix,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 62 (January/February 2006): 24–5; Colin Dueck, “Strategies for Managing Rogue States,” Orbis 50 (Spring 2006): 223–41; and Abbas Maleki and Matthew Bunn, Finding a Way Out of the Iranian Nuclear Crisis, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs Paper (March 2006), http://bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/whatsnew.cfm?program = stpp&nt = top&pb_id = 523 (accessed May 8, 2006).
104. David Albright and Corey Hinderstein, The Clock is Ticking, But How Fast?, Institute for Science and International Security Issue Brief, March 27, 2006, http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/clockticking.pdf (accessed May 8, 2006).
105. John Negroponte, Statement, Worldwide Threats to the United States, Hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, February 2, 2006, Federal News Service, Lexis-Nexis Congressional Database, http://www.lexis-nexis.com (accessed May 8, 2006).
106. For an extended treatment of this theme, see William W. Keller and Gordon R. Mitchell, “Preventive Force: Untangling the Discourse,” in Keller and Mitchell, Hitting First, 239–63.
107. Richard Cheney, quoted in “Vice President Dick Cheney Discusses a Possible War with Iraq,” Meet the Press, March 16, 2003, NBC News Transcripts, Lexis-Nexis News Wire Database, http://www.lexis-nexis.org (accessed February 12, 2006).
108. Lang, “Drinking the Kool-Aid,” 42–8; Benjamin and Simon, The Next Attack, 183.
109. One example of how the caveat emptor approach can produce results involves public argument regarding Iran's alleged role in moving improvised explosive devices into Iraq. On March 13, 2006, President Bush claimed that “Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices in Iraq.” The next day, journalist Charlie Aldinger pressed Pentagon officials to proffer evidence supporting Bush's claim:
You said that Revolutionary Guards and IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and weapons are moving across the border from Iran. What you have not said conclusively is whether the government of Iran and the mullahs are sponsoring that activity. Do you have proof that they are, indeed, behind this, the government of Iran?
After Secretary Rumsfeld handed off Aldinger's probing question to General Peter Pace, Pace admitted: “I do not, sir.” See George W. Bush, President Discusses Freedom and Democracy in Iraq, George Washington University, Washington, DC, March 13, 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/03/20060313-3.html (accessed May 1, 2006); Donald H. Rumsfeld and Peter Pace, DoD News Briefing, Pentagon, Washington, DC, March 14, 2006, http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2006/tr20060314-12644.html (accessed May 1, 2006).
110. Joseph Cirincione, “Fool Me Twice,” Foreign Policy (March 27, 2006), Web exclusive, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id = 3416 (accessed May 8, 2006).
111. Seymour Hersh, “The Iran Plans,” The New Yorker, April 8, 2006, http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact (accessed May 8, 2006).
112. Kenneth Adelman, “Cakewalk in Iraq,” Washington Post, February 13, 2002, p. A27.
113. Ervand Abrahamian, “Empire Strikes Back: Iran in U.S. Sights,” in Inventing the Axis of Evil, ed. Andre Schiffrin (New York: New Press, 2004), 147.
114. On the enduring significance of Operation Ajax in Iran's collective memory, see Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2003); Dan De Luce, “50 Years Later, Iranians Remember US–UK Coup,” Christian Science Monitor, August 22, 2003, p. 8.
115. Reza Pahlavi, Statement at the National Press Club, Washington, DC, March 1, 2006, http://www.rezapahlavi.org/npc2006.html; see also Joseph Cirincione, “Controlling Iran's Nuclear Program,” Issues in Science and Technology 22 (Spring 2006): 80.
116. Michael Walzer, Arguing About War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 163.
117. Pollack, “Spies, Lies and Weapons,” 92.