Tweaking Intelligence to Justify A War

Emptywheel post today at The Next Hurrah suggests a paper trail that may well document a conspiracy to defraud the United States in the run-up to the Iraqi invasion. Conspiracy to defraud is one possible strategy to an impeachment of Bush I posted about last month.

Condi mentioned such early drafts in a press conference the week before the Plame leak. But the SSCI never got to see those early drafts. Instead, they had to take Robert Joseph's word that early drafts didn't include references to Niger.

There's less debate whether there were early drafts of Powell's speech. Indeed, Murray Waas not only tells us there were early drafts, but he tells us why the SSCI didn't receive those drafts: Scooter Libby, with the assistance of David Addington, refused to turn them over, against the counsel of the White House.

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.

Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.

The drafts of these documents, more than the finished speeches, will reveal how the Bush Administration (save Powell) was twisting intelligence. Indeed, they'll delineate precisely what the Bush Administration wanted to claim--and what the CIA and Powell's staff removed during the vetting process. By looking at the drafts, then, we'll know precisely how the Administration--as opposed to the CIA--politicized intelligence.

Getting the White House to turn over documents was one of the issues that turned the first phase of the probe into such a nasty issue in the first place. I have no great hope the White House is going to be any more forthcoming now than they were two years ago (although, Scooter Libby isn't around to obstruct the Senate's investigation anymore). But if the committee can't get the drafts of these speeches, they're only skimming the surface. The real evidence of how the White House politicized intelligence is bound to be in those early drafts. Which is why we're probably never going to learn about them.

Now if Cheney, Libby and Addington all withheld the documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee, perhaps there was a conspiracy to cover-up the fraud. But one would expect the paper trail to pass through multiple hands in Cheney's, Condi's, and Bush's office. Multiple drafts and collaborating evidence could very well prove the case of fraud. No wonder Cheney, Libby and Addington didn't want them seen.