The LA Times (registration required, but Yahoo! reprints it) has a good piece about the Senate Intelligence Committee's report, in specific, a section devoted to the differences between two versions of a key report on Iraq's weapons capabilities used to help justify the US's attack - the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002. Not surprisingly:
The panel laid out numerous instances in which the unclassified version omitted key dissenting opinions about Iraqi weapons capabilities, overstated U.S. knowledge about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons and, in one case, inserted threatening language into the public document that was not contained in the classified version.
The changes made a qualified, nuanced document into one which laid out the case for war.
For example, the panel cited changes made in the section of the NIE dealing with chemical weapons:"Although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile," the classified NIE read, "Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons" of such poisons.
In the unclassified version of the report, the phrase "although we have little specific information" was deleted. Instead, the public report said, "Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents."
Skipping over several other similar instances of changes made to the document, we get to the kicker: who made the changes and why. And here it gets even more infuriating.
Who made the changes:
During a briefing before the report was released, one committee aide said the Senate panel had asked Tenet and Stu Cohen — who, as acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council, oversaw production of the NIE — who was responsible for inserting those words into the unclassified document."They did not know and could not explain," said the aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Why:
According to the intelligence committee report, staffers asked intelligence officials why words like "we judge" and "we assess" were removed during the declassification process.They were told that, because officials believed the white paper would be made public as representing the view of the entire U.S. government, not simply an intelligence community product, it was more appropriate to take references to "we" out of the document. This was done, committee staffers were told, "purely for stylistic reasons."
Stylistic reasons?!?! Who are they kidding?
