CNN's Fact Check Re: the Prewar Intelligence

[Beaverhausen]

This was from last nights' Anderson Cooper show...fantastic!!!

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COOPER: Well, some Democrats are saying the pre-war intelligence was cooked by the White House. The administration is saying the Democrats had the exact same intelligence the White House did. But is that really true?

We asked CNN national correspondent David Ensor to look back and separate facts from fictions.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The president and his aides have counterattacked against critics with two major arguments -- the key one: Congress and the administration had access to the same intelligence.

BUSH: And members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq, and reached the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a threat.

ENSOR: In a general sense, that is true. U.S. intelligence believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and said so in a national intelligence estimate Congress had access to before the war.

But it is not accurate to say Congress and the administration looked at all the same intelligence. The White House had access to far more than lawmakers did. Presidential daily briefs on intelligence are never given to Congress. Some intelligence available to the White House but not to Congress gave reason to doubt some of the president's blunt pre-war assertions, for example, that Iraq had helped al Qaeda on weapons.

BUSH: We have learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making, in poisons, and deadly gases.

ENSOR: The president said that in October 2002. Yet, eight months earlier, the Defense Intelligence Agency questioned the reliability of the captured al Qaeda operative who was the source of that assertion in a document delivered to the White House. It was recently declassified at the insistence of Democratic Senator Carl Levin.

Speaking of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the DIA said -- quote -- "It is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers."

Pentagon spokesmen called the release of the DIA document -- quote -- "irresponsible" and "out of context."

The next major argument from the White House, independent reviews have already determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence before the war.

STEPHEN L. HADLEY, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: They were looked at by the Silberman-Robb commission. They were looked at by the Senate Intelligence community -- Committee. Both of them concluded that there was no manipulation of intelligence.

ENSOR: But, in fact, no commission or committee has yet spoken on whether the White House misrepresented pre-war intelligence. The Senate Intelligence Committee, under pressure from Democrats, is working on it. The orders to the Silberman Commission from the White House specifically left it out.

LAURENCE SILBERMAN, FORMER CHAIRMAN, IRAQ WMD COMMISSION: Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policy-makers. And all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.

ENSOR (on camera): There is, however, plenty of blame to go around. Congress may have voted on Iraq without doing its homework. Members could read the 92-page national intelligence estimate by signing in at a reading room to do so. "The Washington Post" reported that no more than six senators and a handful of House members took time to read beyond the five-page executive summary.

David Ensor, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COOPER: Funny, that.


http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0511/17/acd.01.html