[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 114 (Tuesday, September 21, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9435-S9437]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              REMARKS TO THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

  Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, last week, at the invitation of the Council 
on Foreign Relations and the family of the late Paul Warnke, I gave the 
second annual Paul Warnke Lecture on International Security here in 
Washington. I spoke to the council about the ongoing efforts here in 
the Congress to address the issue of the reform of the intelligence 
community as recommended by the 9/11 Commission and others.
  I told the council that to my mind, at least as important as the 
structural reforms of our intelligence community, and arguably even 
more so, is the need to protect the independence, objectivity and 
integrity of intelligence analyses. Too many times in our past, 
including most recently in the Iraq war, intelligence has been 
manipulated and politicized to support a specific policy.
  I am willing to support the creation of a more powerful National 
Intelligence Director with greater authority over intelligence budgets 
and personnel, but only if this increased power is used to help ensure 
the accuracy, independence, objectivity and integrity of intelligence 
analyses, and not used to promote policy. I don't want a National 
Intelligence Director to be a more powerful ``yes man'' for the 
administration in power.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full text of my 
speech to the Council on Foreign Relations on September 13, 2004, be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

      Remarks of Senator Carl Levin at the Paul Warnke Lecture on 
       International Security at the Council on Foreign Relations

       Thank you, Alton [Frye, Presidential Senior Fellow Emeritus 
     at the Council on Foreign Relations]. Your connection with 
     the Council since 1972 makes you a more enduring figure in 
     Washington than just about anybody besides Senator Byrd.
       It is a pleasure to be back at the Council, and an honor to 
     be giving the second annual Paul Warnke Lecture on 
     International Security. Paul was a great public servant and a 
     tireless advocate for a wise and balanced approach to 
     international security. I know there are some members of the 
     Warnke family here, and I want to start by acknowledging 
     their presence and thanking them for joining in the 
     invitation to me.
       Tonight I want to share some thoughts with you on the 
     reform of our Intelligence Community, which is topic number 
     one in the Senate right now. My remarks are subtitled ``No 
     more slam-dunks please, where nuance is needed.''
       With the end of the Cold War the greatest threats we face 
     are from terrorists. We are less likely to be attacked by 
     nations and armies with tanks and missiles, and more likely 
     to be attacked by terrorists with bombs in trucks or strapped 
     to their bodies.
       Since terrorists are not deterred by the threat of their 
     own destruction, and because terrorist networks are so 
     diffuse, accurate intelligence is absolutely essential to 
     preventing terrorist attacks.
       The release of the 9/11 Commission's Report fueled a debate 
     about how our intelligence community should be reformed to 
     better respond to the terrorist threat. This is a debate we 
     need to have. But in taking on structural reform involving 
     stove-pipes and budget authority, we should not lose sight of 
     the fundamental problem that was dramatically demonstrated 
     not by the pre-9/11 intelligence failures but by the pre-Iraq 
     War intelligence failures.
       The intelligence failures before 9/11 related to 
     intelligence agencies not using information they had and not 
     sharing that information with others. The Report of the 9/11 
     Commission retold the story of people in the CIA and FBI, for 
     instance, who failed to do their jobs in sharing information. 
     And that Report noted the failure to hold anyone accountable. 
     But there is no evidence in the more than 500-page 9/11 
     Commission Report that those failures were caused by 
     inadequate budget power in the Director of Central 
     Intelligence or his lack of authority to hire and fire 
     intelligence personnel in other agencies than the CIA.
       The failures to use and share intelligence have begun to be 
     corrected with the formation of the Terrorist Threat 
     Integration Center (TTIC). Coordination and sharing might be 
     further enhanced by creation of a National Intelligence 
     Director.
       The massive intelligence failures before the Iraq War were 
     of a totally different kind. To a significant degree, they 
     were the result of the CIA shaping and manipulating 
     intelligence to support Administration policy. The CIA's 
     errors were all in one direction, invariably making the Iraqi 
     threat clearer and sharper and more imminent, thereby 
     promoting the Administration's determination to remove Saddam 
     Hussein from power. Nuances were dropped; a slam-dunk was the 
     assessment.
       The CIA was saying to the Administration and to the 
     American people what it thought the Administration wanted to 
     hear.

[[Page S9436]]

       The problem of intelligence being manipulated and 
     politicized is not new. Forty years ago, Secretary of Defense 
     McNamara claimed classified communications intercepts 
     supported passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was 
     used by President Johnson as the legislative foundation for 
     expanding the war in Vietnam.
       Those intercepts proved later to be very dubious. 
     Regardless, the presidential decision had been made, and so 
     intelligence was used to support that decision.
       Intelligence was heavily manipulated by CIA Director 
     William Casey during the Iran-Contra period. The Iran Contra 
     Report cited evidence that Director Casey ``misrepresented or 
     selectively used available intelligence to support the policy 
     he was promoting.''
       The Iran Contra Report urged strongly that ``The gathering, 
     analysis, and reporting of intelligence should be done in 
     such a way that there can be no question that the conclusions 
     are driven by the actual facts, rather than by what a policy 
     advocate hopes these facts will be.''
       Former Secretary of State George Shultz, in his memoir 
     Turmoil and Triumph, recalled Director Casey's actions and 
     concluded that ``The CIA should have nothing to do with 
     policy. You have to keep objectivity in analyses.''
       History repeated itself with the pre-war Iraq intelligence. 
     Before the war, top administration officials asserted that 
     Saddam Hussein definitely had weapons of mass destruction and 
     had close links to the al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked 
     us on 9/11.
       The President said in March of 2002 that ``[Saddam Hussein] 
     possesses the world's most dangerous weapons.''
       The Vice President in August of 2002 said ``. . . we know 
     that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear 
     weapons. Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire 
     nuclear weapons fairly soon.''
       National Security Advisor Rice said on September 8, 2002 
     that ``We do know that there have been shipments going . . . 
     into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are 
     only suited . . . for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge 
     programs.''
       A few weeks later, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that 
     ``Very likely all they need to complete a weapon is fissile 
     materials--and they are, at this moment, seeking that 
     material--both from foreign sources and the capability to 
     produce it indigenously.''
       On September 19th, 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld said that 
     Saddam Hussein ``has, at this moment, stockpiles of chemical 
     and biological weapons, and is pursuing nuclear weapons.''
       Regarding al Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein, President Bush 
     made the unqualified link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein 
     on September 25th, 2002, when he said ``you can't distinguish 
     between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on 
     terror.''
       Following those kind of strong public statements of senior 
     administration leaders, qualifications and cautious words in 
     previous Intelligence Community reports were dropped, and 
     intelligence was shaped more and more to reflect and support 
     the certainty of the administration's policy statements.
       For instance, on February 11, 2003, DCI Tenet publicly 
     stated, as though it were fact, that Iraq ``has provided 
     training in poisons and gases to two al-Qaida associates.'' 
     However, in his then-classified testimony on September 17, 
     2002, which reflected the underlying intelligence analysis, 
     Director Tenet acknowledged that the information on training 
     was ``from sources of varying reliability.'' The underlying 
     intelligence also acknowledged that the information was ``at 
     times contradictory.'' As the Senate Intelligence Committee 
     report makes clear, DCI Tenet's public testimony could lead 
     people to believe incorrectly ``that the CIA believed the 
     training had definitely occurred.''
       That Senate Intelligence Committee 500-page unanimous 
     report set out dozens of instances like that where the CIA or 
     its leaders made statements about Iraq's WMD which were 
     significantly more certain than the underlying classified 
     intelligence reporting or than their previous classified 
     statements.
       The first overall conclusion of that Senate Intelligence 
     Committee report is that ``Most of the major key judgments in 
     the Intelligence Community's October 2002 National 
     Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq's Continuing Programs for 
     Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated or were not 
     supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting.''
       The CIA's efforts to support Administration policy instead 
     of doing what they are supposed to do--which is to inform 
     Administration policy makers--wasn't limited to WMD issues. 
     DCI Tenet also helped support the Administration's contention 
     that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were closely linked, or as 
     President Bush had said on September 28, 2002, ``each passing 
     day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives 
     anthrax or VX nerve gas or someday a nuclear weapon to a 
     terrorist group.'' This took a special contortion on DCI 
     Tenet's part because the CIA's then-classified analysis 
     was that there were no significant links between Saddam 
     Hussein and al Qaeda.
       Here is some background on that: on October 7, 2002, at our 
     request, the CIA in a letter to the Senate Intelligence 
     Committee declassified its assessment and indicated Iraq was 
     unlikely to provide WMD to terrorists, and that providing WMD 
     to terrorists would be an ``extreme step'' for Saddam 
     Hussein, likely to be taken by him only in response to an 
     attack against him by us. However, DCI Tenet told the New 
     York Times that there was ``no inconsistency'' between the 
     views in that CIA letter and the President's views on the 
     subject. His statement was clearly incorrect, but it 
     supported the Administration by trying to blur the 
     inconsistency. The Senate voted on the authorization to use 
     force a few days later on October 11.
       And the CIA went along with the Administration's repeated 
     references to a reported meeting in Prague between an Iraqi 
     intelligence officer and the lead hijacker in April of 2001. 
     At a hearing in February of this year, I asked Director Tenet 
     about that alleged meeting. He told me that the CIA had ``not 
     gathered enough evidence to conclude that it happened,'' and 
     that ``I don't know that it took place. I can't say that it 
     did.'' What he neglected to say, again bending over backwards 
     to protect Administration policy, was that the CIA did not 
     believe the meeting had happened. He finally acknowledged 
     that publicly a few weeks ago when the CIA said that there 
     was an ``absence of any credible information that the April 
     2001 meeting occurred.''
       Again, in all of these cases, and many others, where public 
     statements of the CIA varied from the underlying classified 
     intelligence before the war, the Iraqi threat became clearer 
     and more dire and the presence of WMD more certain. In public 
     statements and reports, the CIA leadership had effectively 
     become a political arm of the White House. There is no other 
     explanation which has any ring of truth.
       That is not the only rational inference. It also has some 
     explicit evidentiary support. You remember the scene in Bob 
     Woodward's book, Plan of Attack, after the Intelligence 
     Community's case regarding Iraqi WMD was presented to the 
     President in the Oval Office on December 21st, 2002:
       ``Bush turned to Tenet. `I've been told all this 
     intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we've 
     got?'
       ``From the end of one of the couches in the Oval Office, 
     Tenet rose up, threw his arms in the air. 'It's a slam-dunk 
     case!' the director of central intelligence said.
       ``Bush pressed. `George, how confident are you?'
       ``Tenet, a basketball fan who attended as many home games 
     of his alma mater Georgetown University as possible, leaned 
     forward and threw his arms up again. `Don't worry, it's slam-
     dunk!''
       George Shultz's admonition about the fundamental need to 
     separate intelligence from policy as the only way to obtain 
     objective and independent intelligence, had been dramatically 
     proven again. Other experts have reminded us of this point.
       Former DCI Judge William Webster told the Senate 
     Governmental Affairs Committee a few weeks ago that:
       ``With respect to relations with the president, while the 
     leader of the intelligence community must be the principal 
     advisor on intelligence to the president, he must work hard--
     very hard--to avoid either the reality or the perception that 
     intelligence is being framed--read ``spun''--to support a 
     foreign policy of the administration.''
       Former chief weapons inspector David Kay put it this way 
     before the Senate Intelligence Committee:
       ``Intelligence must serve the nation and speak truth to 
     power even if in some cases elected leaders chose, as is 
     their right, to disagree with the intelligence with which 
     they are presented. This means that intelligence should not 
     be part of the political apparatus or process.''
       How does all of this affect the pending consideration of 
     intelligence reform? I have the good fortune (I guess) to be 
     the only Senator to serve on all three Senate Committees 
     which are considering intelligence reform legislation issues. 
     We have held about 10 hearings since the 9/11 Commission 
     report was presented, and are expected to have legislation 
     prepared for the Senate by October. Most of the focus so far 
     has been on fixing the pre-9/11 type failures; that is, the 
     failures of information sharing and coordination.
       To my mind, at least as important as the structural 
     reforms, and arguably even more so, is the need to protect 
     the independence, objectivity and integrity of intelligence 
     analyses.
       I am willing to support the creation of a more powerful 
     National Intelligence Director, with greater authority over 
     intelligence budgets and personnel, but only if this 
     increased power is used to help ensure the accuracy, 
     independence, objectivity and integrity of intelligence 
     analyses, and not used to promote policy. I don't want a 
     National Intelligence Director to be a more powerful ``yes 
     man'' for the Administration in power.
       One way to promote more objective and independent 
     intelligence is to put Congress on a roughly equal basis with 
     the executive branch as a primary consumer of intelligence. 
     The National Intelligence Director and the entire 
     Intelligence Community must understand that their analyses 
     are just as much for Congress as for the President. It also 
     means that senior intelligence leaders should be subject to 
     Senate confirmation. And it surely means that the National 
     Intelligence Director should not be established in the 
     Cabinet or in the Executive Office of the President.
       And giving both the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the House 
     and Senate Intelligence Committees the power to obtain 
     documents and initiate investigations--much

[[Page S9437]]

     like the current Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of 
     the Governmental Affairs Committee--would also strengthen 
     congressional oversight.
       The bottom line is that terrorism is currently our number 
     one threat, and intelligence is our most essential tool to 
     deal with that threat. Before we create a stronger National 
     Intelligence Director, in a position which has too often 
     produced intelligence shaped to promote policy, we must take 
     steps to ensure that a strengthened National Intelligence 
     Director--and indeed our entire Intelligence Community--is 
     free to provide objective, independent intelligence analyses. 
     Our future security depends on it.

                          ____________________