Congressional Record: October 3, 2002 (Senate)
Page S9870-S9892
21ST CENTURY DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE APPROPRIATIONS AUTHORIZATION ACT--
CONFERENCE REPORT
[...]
Use of Force Against Iraq
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, we have really already begun the debate on a
resolution to authorize the use of force against Iraq if the President
deems it necessary. Several Members have come to the Chamber and spoken
about the issue. We are going to begin that debate formally sometime
this evening, I believe, and it will continue on through Friday,
Monday, and then shortly thereafter we will be voting on this important
resolution.
As with the debate 11 years ago when force was authorized and we
repelled Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Members of both bodies
discussed the issue at a level, frankly, that we are unaccustomed to
doing. When we are making a decision to send our young men and women
into harm's way, when we are literally authorizing war, I think a
degree of seriousness begins to pervade all of our thinking. We address
these issues with the utmost of seriousness because we are aware of the
consequences, and they deserve no less, and our constituents and our
military deserve no less than that degree of consideration.
When we debate this issue, we will find there are good arguments on
both sides of the issue, and I realize there will be different nuances,
so it is not as if there are just two sides to the debate. But at the
end of the day, we are going to have the question before us: Are we
going to authorize the use of force?
There will be some alternatives before us. That debate needs to be
based upon the very best information, the very best intelligence, the
very best analysis we can bring to bear, and it also has to be based
upon a good relationship between the legislative and the executive
branches because in war we are all in it together. We have to
cooperate. We have to support the Commander in Chief.
The last thing we would ever do is to authorize the Commander in
Chief to take action and then not support that action. Our foes abroad,
as well as our allies abroad, need to know we will be united once a
decision is made, and we will execute the operation to succeed, if it
is called for.
I am very disturbed at the way that part of this debate is beginning,
and that is what I wanted to speak to today. There has been an effort
by some to broadly paint the administration as uncooperative in sharing
intelligence information with the Senate, and more specifically the
Senate Intelligence Committee.
I have been a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee now for
almost 8 years, and I have been involved in the middle of a lot of
disputes about information sharing. When we are sharing information
about intelligence, those issues are inevitable, just as they are
sometimes with law enforcement. In our democracy, these become very
difficult decisions because we are a wide open country. We tend to want
to share everything, but we also recognize there have to be a few
things we cannot share with the enemy, and the lines are not always
brightly drawn. Sometimes the executive branch and the legislative
branch get into tiffs about what information should be shared, what
information cannot be shared. Again, reasonable minds can differ about
the specifics of those issues, but what has arisen is a very unhealthy
war of words about motives and intentions, and we need to nip that in
the bud today.
I read a story in the New York Times reporting on a meeting of the
Intelligence Committee, which I attended yesterday in the secure area
where the Intelligence Committee meets, under strict rules of
classification. We were briefed by two of the top officials of the
intelligence community about matters of the utmost in terms of
importance and secrecy, and yet there is a three-page story in the New
York Times which discusses much of what was discussed in that meeting,
without ever
[[Page S9883]]
attributing a single assertion or quotation. There is no name used of
anybody who was in that room, and so we do not know exactly who it was
who went to the New York Times and talked about what went on in our
meeting.
I am not suggesting classified information was leaked. I would have
to have an analysis done to determine whether anything in the article
was actually classified information. What was discussed was a purported
dispute between our committee and the executive branch about the
release of certain information and the preparation of certain reports.
I will get into more detail about this in a minute.
Obviously, somebody from the committee, a Member or staff, went
complaining to the New York Times and spread, therefore, on the pages
of this paper a whole series of allegations about motives and
intentions of the Bush administration relating to the basis for seeking
authority to use force against Iraq, if necessary. This is exactly what
will undercut the authority of the President in trying to build a
coalition abroad as well as in the United States, and it is the very
people who demand the President achieve that international coalition
before we take action who are the most exercised about what they
perceive to be a slight from the administration and who, therefore, are
being quoted in this story.
I do not know the names, but there is a limited universe of people
involved. I am going to go over this article in fine detail just to
illustrate my point.
One of the sources cited in the story is a congressional official. I
will quote the entire sentence.
One congressional official said that the incident has badly
damaged Mr. Tenet's relations with Congress, something that
Mr. Tenet has always worked hard to cultivate.
Mr. Tenet is George Tenet, the director of the CIA. Sometimes I agree
with Mr. Tenet and sometimes I do not agree with Mr. Tenet, but I
believe Mr. Tenet has the best interests of the United States of
America at heart when he is working with the President and Congress to
present information and develop the appropriate approach to the use of
force, if that is necessary.
My point was this, though: The article quotes one congressional
official. What is a congressional official? It is either a Member of
the Senate or the House of Representatives--though no Representatives
were in this meeting; it was just a meeting of Senators--or it is a
staff person hired by the Senate.
I find it interesting the article quotes a congressional official.
Most of the article quotes congressional leaders, Government
officials, or lawmakers. Either a Member of the Senate or a member of
our staff talked to the press about what went on in the meeting and did
so in order to damage, or to call into question, I should say, the
relationship between the Senate and the executive branch, and to
question whether the administration was being cooperative with the
Senate in providing information.
Let me discuss this in detail now. The central theme is identified in
the first line of the story:
The Central Intelligence Agency has refused to provide
Congress a comprehensive report on its role in a possible
American campaign against Iraq, setting off a bitter dispute
between the agency and leaders of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, congressional leaders said today.
Those are Senators--not staff but congressional leaders. Only
Senators were in the meeting. So some Senators said the CIA had refused
to provide us with a comprehensive report on the agency's role in a
possible American campaign, and this set off a bitter dispute between
the CIA and leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee would be probably two
people, the chairman and ranking member. Mr. Shelby, the ranking
member, the Senator from Alabama, will have to speak for himself. The
chairman is Senator Graham from Florida. I suggest they need to clarify
what their view is with respect to this story.
In the first place, it is not true the Central Intelligence Agency
has refused to provide us with the report described in the story. There
were two reports requested. As the article discloses, the first report
has been provided. It was done at breakneck speed. It has to do with
Iraq's capabilities; what kind of chemical and biological weapons does
Iraq really possess; how far along is it in developing its nuclear
capability; what means of delivery does it have; and a host of other
questions that were put to the intelligence community. It is obviously
important for us to have the answers to those questions before we take
action.
The reality is the information was all there. It had simply not been
put together in one report, as the committee requested. What we
requested was something called a national intelligence estimate. A
national intelligence estimate is not requested by the Congress. A
national intelligence estimate is ordinarily requested by the President
or the National Security Council, and it is essentially a document
which is supposed to analyze a particular country's or region's threat,
or threat from weapons of mass destruction. It frequently takes a long
time, up to a year, perhaps, to prepare. The purpose for it is to
inform both the administration and others such as the Congress that
would be dealing with the issues, but it is not intended to be an
operational document; that is to say, to be integrated in operational
military plans. Nevertheless, even though this is not the normal way
the document would be prepared, the agency people worked overtime to
produce, in a matter of several days, a very thorough report. About 100
pages in length was produced in about 3 weeks, according to the story,
under very tight deadlines.
It was presented yesterday. Most of the information had been
presented before in a different way. But it was put together in one
package.
Leaders of the committee expressed their outrage that Director Tenet
was not there in person to testify. He was with the President at the
time. The two people who briefed us were very top officials of the
intelligence community who probably knew more on a firsthand basis what
was in the report even than Director Tenet. Some Members did not want
to ask them questions but wanted to wait for Director Tenet to arrive,
a pretty petulant attitude when we are trying to seriously address
questions of war and peace.
The information was before us. No one questioned the veracity of the
information. We had a good hearing in discussing the various elements.
That was one of the reports. There was complaining it should have been
earlier, it should have been done more quickly. As pointed out,
ordinarily these are the kind of reports that usually take a year to
put together; it was done in a matter of 3 weeks. Under the
circumstances, the community is to be complimented.
The other report requested had to do with the role of the
intelligence community in military operations, potential military
operations against Iraq. In effect what was being asked, if we take
forcible action against Iraq, and any aspect of the intelligence
community is used in those operations, what is it likely to be? What is
the likely response going to be? How effective do you think it will be?
That is what the article means, in the first sentence, when it talks
about a comprehensive report on its role in a possible American
campaign against Iraq.
The intelligence community, wisely, has a standard policy against
doing analyses of U.S. action that is not overt and tied to military
operations. We do not know our military plans for military action
against Iraq if it were to come. Only the President and a handful of
people involved in those plans know what they are. Thank goodness for
that. There is so much leaking in this Government--both at the
executive branch level and the legislative branch level--it would be
folly in the extreme for operational plans to be discussed broadly
before an operation begins or during the operation, for that matter.
That is why we do not present that kind of analysis to anyone. Members
of the Intelligence Committee ought to know that and ought not to feel
slighted because it was not presented to us and because it will not be
presented to us. That kind of information would be directly related to
the plan of attack that the President may eventually approve.
We know our leaders get called just before an operation begins and
once it is begun, we begin to get information about how we will conduct
the operation. But can anyone reasonably believe the plans of our
military and intelligence community, in cooperating
[[Page S9884]]
with some kind of action, should be put in a document and released to
the Congress, even in classified form? If this article is any
indication, it would be 1 day before it would be in the newspaper. We
cannot do that, putting at risk the lives of the men and women we may
send in harm's way.
One success in the Afghanistan operation was the fact that we were
able to combine good intelligence with military capability. Without
going into a lot of detail, everyone appreciates the fact we were able
to get assets on the ground from whatever source, providing information
to our aircraft, for example, about very specifically where certain
targets were. As a result of having that good intelligence, we were
able to strike at the heart of the enemy, avoid for the most part
civilian casualties, or collateral damage, and very quickly overthrow
the Taliban government, and rout or capture a lot of the al-Qaida.
We do not know much publicly about the interrelationship between the
intelligence community and the military, but we know they combined
efforts to make this a successful operation. That is all most Members
need to know.
We do not need to know in advance of a military operation how the
intelligence community is going to be integrated with the military in
conducting this campaign, what they are each going to do, and what the
enemy might do in response and so on.
The article itself alludes to this when it talks about the ordinary
purpose of a national intelligence estimate. But intelligence officials
say a national intelligence estimate is designed to assess the policies
of foreign countries, not those of the United States. I quote:
"They were asking for an assessment of U.S. policy, and
that falls outside the realm of the NIE and gets into the
purview of the Commander and Chief," an intelligence
official said.
That is correct. So there was a misunderstanding of what a national
intelligence estimate was, on the first part; second, the request for
the information went far beyond what the administration should have
been asked to provide and what it could provide. Yet Members of the
committee were indignant that the administration had stiffed the
committee, had stonewalled, had refused to provide this information.
We have to engage in a serious debate about a very serious subject in
a relatively objective way. We all bring our biases and prejudices to
the debate. But one thing that should be clear to all of us is that the
thing that is paramount is the security of American military forces in
the conduct of an operation. And that cannot be jeopardized by either
the inadvertent or advertent leak of material that pertains directly to
those military operations.
What was being requested here was wrong. And the administration was
right to say: I'm sorry, we cannot give that to you. The debate should
not be adversely influenced by this unfortunate set of circumstances.
We should decide whether we want to authorize force and what kind of
force is authorized based upon the merits of the argument as we assess
them.
No one here should be led down this path that says one of the reasons
we should not act yet, or that we should deny the administration the
authority is because they have stonewalled us. They have not given us
information we need before we can make a judgment.
As a member of the Intelligence Committee, that is simply not true.
There are briefings being conducted now--both in an informal way, very
classified but informally, as well as formally--to Members of this body
and the House of Representatives, to answer Members' questions about
Iraqi's capabilities and intentions as we see them and our assessment
of circumstances. I encourage all Members to get those briefings and to
ask any question they can think of asking and to try to keep it up
until the questions have been answered. Some perhaps may not be
answered.
For the most part, they will learn of the primary reasons the
President has decided it may be necessary to take military action
against Iraq. What they will not learn, should not learn, and for
national security purposes cannot learn, is how the intelligence
community is going to be working with the military in the campaign
should one be authorized. Those are operational plans that only the
President and his military and small group of advisers can be aware of
before there is military action begun.
There is other information in this news story that is inaccurate, in
suggesting that there has been this huge tug of war between the
committee and the CIA about getting information. In my own personal
view, a lot of it has to do with lack of communication, lack of clear
specificity about what was requested. I remember when the original
request was made, it was a rather routine kind of request, certainly
not the big deal that some members of the committee are trying to turn
it into. Information was given orally about when it would be provided
to us, and information was given orally about the fact that the
military operations could not be discussed. Yet members of the
committee seemed to be pretty upset about the fact that we had not
gotten a formal letter from George Tenet laying this all out.
The members of the Intelligence Committee who were there apologized
and said: If we had thought a formal letter was necessary or we could
have gotten it to you sooner and didn't do that, we are sorry about
that. But here are the facts. You wanted to know what the facts are,
and here are the facts.
So I do not think we should be dissuaded from basing a decision on
the merits of the case, one way or the other, however we decide to
vote, on the phony issue of whether or not somebody is providing us
information or whether they got it to us soon enough or whether the
head guy came down to testify as opposed to people directly below him.
As I said, he will be there to testify tomorrow in any event. This is
all a smokescreen. It may be useful to some people who want to find
some reason not to support the President other than simply outright
opposition to taking military action. I understand that. There seems to
be a popular view that most Americans want to take military action and
politically people had better get on that bandwagon, so maybe people
who do not really want to take that action have to find some reason,
some rationalization, for not doing it.
But I really don't think that is right. I think a lot of American
people are where most of us are. We would prefer not to have to take
military action. We would hope to have a coalition of allies. We hope
there will be some way to avoid this. But at the end of the day, if the
President decides it is necessary, we are probably willing to go along
and authorize the use of force.
There is nothing wrong with taking the position that at the end of
the day we are not yet ready to make that decision and therefore not
vote to authorize the use of force. If that is where Members come down
and that is what they in their hearts believe, that is what they should
say and that is how they should vote. But what they should not do is
try to latch onto an artificial reason for saying no, predicated upon
some perceived slight by the Director of the CIA or failure to provide
information quickly enough or in exactly the form they wanted it or
most certainly on the grounds that the intelligence community has not
provided the kind of information about operations of the intelligence
community that they would like to get. That information should not be
provided, and nobody should base a decision here on the failure to
obtain that information.
Let me just speak a little bit more broadly. I will ask unanimous
consent that at the conclusion of my remarks this particular article be
printed in the Record.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 1.)
Mr. KYL. A lot of people are approaching this issue on the basis that
there has to be some demonstration that, in the relatively near future,
Saddam Hussein is going to use a weapon of mass destruction against us
or else this is not the time that we should take military action
against him. That is a rational position to take, in a way. If you do
not think that there is a real threat or that it is imminent, you could
reach the conclusion that we should not engage in war, or at least
ought to be continuing to try to engage in diplomacy or whatever.
But there is another side to the coin. It is the way the President
has chosen
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to look at it. I think, because he has chosen to look at it this way,
he will go down in history as a very prescient leader.
Noemie Emery, who is a fine writer, in an article in a periodical a
week ago, observed that most Presidents have had to fight a war but
only two Presidents have had to perceive a war. Harry Truman perceived
the cold war. He instinctively knew at the end of World War II, when
the Soviet Union was beginning to assert its power in regions of
southern Europe, for example, and elsewhere, that it was important for
the United States and other Western allies to stand and say no to the
further expansion of the Soviet Union and communism, even though that
was going to mean a longtime confrontation with the Soviet Union which
might even escalate into a hot war.
The Marshall plan to assist countries in southern Europe was a part
of that perception, and we are well aware of all the other events that
followed that. He perceived the need to stand and thwart the continued
aggression of an evil power, and we are grateful to him for that.
Emery said the other President to perceive a war is George W. Bush.
Of course, September 11, you can say, made that easy. But I submit it
is not necessarily that easy. Over time, people will begin to wonder
whether our commitment to a war on terror is really all that important
if there are not further attacks. If we go another several months,
hopefully even a year or two, without a major terrorist attack on the
United States, will the American people continue to believe that this
is a war worth fighting? Or was it a one-time-only proposition?
George W. Bush perceived the need to conduct a war on terror because
he understood that from a historical point of view, over the course of
the last dozen or 15 years, there had been a whole series of attacks
against the United States or our interests, and when we in Congress
Monday morning quarterback the FBI and CIA and say, "You failed to
connect the dots," I wonder what those same people say about President
Bush's understanding of the history leading up to September 11. He is
connecting the dots between the Khobar Towers and the Cole bombing and
the embassy bombings in Africa. You can even go back further than that,
bringing it on forward all the way up to September 11. Does an event
have to occur every 6 months for us to believe this is really a war
worth stopping or worth winning and bringing to conclusion? I do not
think so.
I think the President, when he said to the American people, we are
going to have to be patient in this war, understood that we would have
to be patient, that it could take a long time. I have been very
gratified at the response of the American people in not being as
impatient as we usually are as a people.
Americans love to get in, get the job done, and move on. That is a
great trait of Americans. But the President here is saying be patient.
So far, I have been very impressed that the American people have been
very patient. What the President has perceived, that not everybody has
perceived, is that this is a struggle that has been going on for some
time and it is going to continue in that same vein for as far out as we
can see, unless we defeat terrorism.
So the wrong question to be asking at this time is: Can you prove
that there is an imminent threat to the United States as a result of
which we have to take military action against Iraq? That is the wrong
question.
There are many fronts in this war on terror, from Lackawanna in New
York where we get the six people who we think were connected to
terrorism, to Tora Bora, Afghanistan, where we had to rout out members
of al-Qaida; to Pakistan, where we are fighting remnants of al-Qaida;
to places such as Yemen and Sudan and Somalia and the Philippines and
Malaysia; Hamburg, Germany, where we have had to roll up al-Qaida
operatives; and then other places in the Middle East where there is
terrorism going on every day and when there are people such as Saddam
Hussein building weapons of mass terror who would not be doing that,
would not be spending the resources and trying to hide them, simply to
play some kind of game. They are obviously serious people with evil
intentions. I think everybody concedes that.
Then the question becomes: Why should you put the burden on the
President to prove that at a particular time Saddam Hussein is going to
strike the United States in order to conclude that we have to do
something about him? It is the same kind of thinking as in the late
1930s, that, in retrospect, we look back on and say: Anybody could have
realized that Hitler was somebody who had to be stopped. Why did
Neville Chamberlain act so foolishly when he came back from Munich and
said, "Peace in our time"?
I submit there are people today who are hoping against hope that
Saddam Hussein will never use these weapons, weapons that are far
greater than anything Adolph Hitler ever had in terms of their
potential for destruction and death. I just wonder whether there are
people who really believe we should wait until something specific and
objective happens before we have a right to act, or whether
preventative action is called for. Some call it preemption; some call
it prevention. But the idea is that with war on terrorism you shouldn't
have to wait until you are attacked to respond. That creates too many
deaths, too much misery, and is unthinkable after September 11.
The President, based upon good intelligence, has concluded that
Saddam Hussein has a very large stock of very lethal weapons of mass
destruction. By that, we mean chemical agents and biological agents
which have been or can be "weaponized"; that is to say, there are
means of delivering those agents that can cause massive amounts of
casualties; that he has been working to acquire a nuclear weapon.
All of this is in open, public debate. And there is no doubt about
any of it. The only doubt with respect to nuclear weapons is exactly
where he is in the process. Of course, we don't know because he hasn't
allowed us to inspect the places in his country where we believe he is
trying to produce these nuclear weapons or, more specifically, the
enriched uranium that would be a part of the weapons.
For 4 years now, we have had no inspectors in the country, and before
that most of the information that we got was based upon information
from defectors--people who came out of Iraq and told us: You guys are
missing what Saddam Hussein is doing. This is where you need to look.
This is what you need to look for.
When our inspectors then demanded to go to those places, one of three
things happened. Either they said, no, you can't go there; that is a
Presidential palace or whatever it is, or they went there and as they
were walking in the front door satellite photos showed people running
out of the backdoors with the stuff, or in the couple of cases we
actually did find evidence of these weapons of mass destruction. Of
course, at that point, Saddam Hussein said: Oh, that's right. I forgot
about that. But whatever the defector said, that is all there is.
So he was confirming exactly what we already knew and gave us nothing
more than that. Yet there are those who believe through some kind of
new inspection process that we are going to learn more than we did
before; that this will be an adequate substitute for going in and
finding these weapons of mass destruction in an unrestricted way.
Saddam Hussein first said, You can have total access with no
conditions, and he immediately began tying on conditions, the basis of
which are laughable. You can't go into the Presidential palaces. They
are grounds or areas with 1,000 buildings the size of the District of
Columbia. We are going to send three inspectors in there? OK. There is
the District of Columbia with all the buildings, and so on. Have at it.
We are not going to find anything. We are going to be running around
for years. So inspections are merely a means to an end. They are not
the end. The goal here is not to have inspections. The goal is
disarmament. And we know from intelligence that he has certain things
he has not disarmed; that he hasn't done what he promised to do--both
to the United States and the United Nations; that he hasn't complied
with the United Nations resolutions. In fact, we see his violation of
those resolutions almost every day. We don't have inspectors in there
anymore who he was harassing and precluding from doing their job.
But we do have aircraft flying in the no-fly zones and having
American pilots and British pilots shot at every
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month, necessitating our taking those SAM sites and radar sites out
of action by military force. So, in a sense, this is unfinished
business from the gulf war which has never stopped. At a low level we
have been trying to enforce the resolutions ever since the end of the
gulf war. Our effort to rid many of these weapons of mass destruction
is but the latest chapter.
We made the decision in 1998 that Saddam Hussein had to go. We voted
on a resolution here, and everybody was for it in 1998. If it was the
right thing to do then, why is it no longer necessarily the right thing
to do? He has had 4 more years to develop these weapons and to get
closer to a nuclear capability.
We now have a group of terrorists in the world who we know talk to
each other, help each other, and give each other safe passage and
access and places for training, and so on. We are developing
information on connections with these terrorists and the State of Iraq.
All of this has happened in the meantime. But now, suddenly, it is not
the time.
If we establish too high a burden of proof here we are going to be
fiddling until we become absolutely sure it is time, and then it will
be too late. That is why I believe the President is on the right track
to say we don't know exactly when, where, or how but we know that this
is a man who has very evil intentions and is working very hard to be
able to strike at us. We can't let it happen. We can't wait until he
has hit us to get him.
For those reasons, and a variety of others that I will be talking
about, I believe it is important for us to go into this debate with a
view towards supporting the President, and the action that he has
called for publicly and in the resolution that he has negotiated with
congressional leaders and which has been placed on the floor.
I believe at the end of the day we will conclude that the President
should be supported and that we should authorize the use of force, and
that we will have intelligence satisfactory for all of us to back up
this resolution. And the final point--going back to the original point
of my conversation today--that it is a phony issue to somehow demand
that the intelligence community provide us with information to which we
haven't been given access. We have gotten all that we need to have
access to. Our Members have asked for that information, and they can
get it. The only information that they can't get is information that
should not be provided anybody, including you, Mr. President, myself,
and the distinguished minority leader who now joins us on the floor.
I will have more to say later. I know the minority leader has some
things he would like to say. At this point, I yield the floor.
Exhibit 1
[From the New York Times, Oct. 3, 2002]
C.I.A. Rejects Request for Report on Preparations for War in Iraq
(By James Risen)
Washington, October 2.--The Central Intelligence Agency has
refused to provide Congress a comprehensive report on its
role in a possible American campaign against Iraq, setting
off a bitter dispute between the agency and leaders of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, Congressional leaders said
today.
In a contentious, closed-door Senate hearing today, agency
officials refused to comply with a request from the committee
for a broad review of how the intelligence community's
clandestine role against the government of Saddam Hussein
would be coordinated with the diplomatic and military actions
that the Bush administration is planning.
Lawmakers said they were further incensed because the
director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who had
been expected to testify about the Iraq report, did not
appear at the classified hearing. A senior intelligence
official said Mr. Tenet was meeting with President Bush.
Instead, the agency was represented by the deputy director,
John McLaughlin, and Robert Walpole, the national
intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs.
The agency rejected the committee's request for a report.
After the rejection, Congressional leaders accused the
administration of not providing the information out of fear
of revealing divisions among the State Department, C.I.A.,
Pentagon and other agencies over the Bush administration's
Iraq strategy.
Government officials said that the agency's response also
strongly suggested that Mr. Bush had already made important
decisions on how to use the C.I.A. in a potential war with
Iraq. One senior government official said it appeared that
the C.I.A. did not want to issue an assessment of the Bush
strategy that might appear to be "second-guessing" of the
president's plans.
The dispute was the latest of several confrontations
between the C.I.A. and Congress over access to information
about a range of domestic and foreign policy matters. Just
last week, lawyers for the General Accounting Office and Vice
President Dick Cheney argued in federal court over whether
the White House must turn over confidential information on
the energy policy task force that Mr. Cheney headed last
year.
The C.I.A.'s rejection of the Congressional request, which
some lawmakers contend was heavily influenced by the White
House, comes as relations between the agency and Congress
have badly deteriorated. The relations have soured over the
ongoing investigation by a joint House-Senate inquiry--
composed of members of the Senate and House intelligence
committees--into the missed signals before the Sept. 11
attacks.
Mr. Tenet in particular has been a target of lawmakers.
Last Friday, Mr. Tenet, a former Senate staffer himself,
wrote a scathing letter to the leaders of the joint
Congressional inquiry, denouncing the panel for writing a
briefing paper that questioned the honesty of a senior C.I.A.
official before he even testified.
A senior intelligence official said Mr. Tenet's absence at
the hearing today was unavoidable, and that no slight was
intended. The official said that he missed the hearing
because he was at the White House with Mr. Bush, helping to
brief other Congressional leaders Iraq. The official said Mr.
Tenet had advised the committee staff several days ago that
he would not be able to attend. Mr. Tenet has promised to
testify about the matter in another classified hearing on
Friday, officials said.
One Congressional official said that the incident has badly
damaged Mr. Tenet's relations with Congress, something that
Mr. Tenet had always worked hard to cultivate.
"I hope we aren't seeing some schoolyard level of
petulance," by the C.I.A., the official said.
While the House and Senate intelligence oversight committee
have received classified information about planned covert
operations against Iraq, the C.I.A. has not told lawmakers
how the agency and the Bush administration see those
operations fitting into the larger war on Iraq, or the global
war on terrorism, Congressional officials said.
"What they haven't told us is how does the intelligence
piece fit into the larger offensive against Iraq, or how do
these extra demands on our intelligence capabilities affect
our commitment to the war on terrorism in Afghanistan," said
one official.
Congressional leaders complained that they have been left
in the dark on how the intelligence community will be used
just as they are about to debate a resolution to support war
with Iraq.
Congressional leaders said the decision to fight the
Congressional request may stem from a fear of exposing
divisions within the intelligence community over the
administration's Iraq strategy, perhaps including a debate
between the agency and the Pentagon over the military's role
in intelligence operations in Iraq.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been moving to
strengthen his control over the military's intelligence
apparatus, potentially setting up a turf war for dominance
among American intelligence officials. Mr. Rumsfeld has also
been pushing to expand the role of American Special
Operations Forces into covert operations, including
activities that have traditionally been the preserve of the
C.I.A.
Congressional leaders asked for the report in July, and
expressed particular discontent that the C.I.A. did not
respond for two months. Lawmakers had asked that the report
be provided in the form of a national intelligence estimate,
a formal document that is supposed to provide a consensus
judgment by the several intelligence agencies.
The committee wanted to see whether analysts at different
agencies, including the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence
Agency, the National Security Agency and the State
Department, have sharply differing views about the proper
role of the intelligence community in Iraq.
But intelligence officials say that a national intelligence
estimate is designed to assess the policies of foreign
countries--not those of the United States. "They were asking
for an assessment of U.S. policy, and that falls outside the
realm of the N.I.E., and it gets into the purview of the
commander in chief," an intelligence official said.
Committee members have also expressed anger that the C.I.A.
refused to fully comply with a separate request for another
national intelligence estimate, one that would have provided
an overview of the intelligence community's latest assessment
on Iraq. Instead, the C.I.A. provided a narrower report,
dealing specifically with Iraq's program to develop weapons
of mass destruction.
Lawmakers said that Mr. Tenet had assured the committee in
early September that intelligence officials were in the midst
of producing an updated national intelligence estimate on
Iraq, and that the committee would receive it as soon as it
was completed.
Instead, the Senate panel received the national
intelligence estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
program after 10
[[Page S9887]]
p.m. on Tuesday night, too late for members to read it before
Wednesday's hearing.
The committee had "set out an explicit set of requests"
for what was to be included in the Iraq national intelligence
estimate, said one official. Those requirements were not met.
"We wanted to know what the intelligence community's
assessment of the effect on a war in Iraq on neighboring
states, and they did not answer that question," the official
said.
A senior intelligence official said the 100-page report on
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program was completed in
three weeks under very tight Congressional deadlines, and the
writing had to be coordinated with several agencies.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The minority leader.
Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I believe in just a moment the Senate will
be ready to move to completion on the Department of Justice
authorization conference report.
Mr. President, I say to Senator Kyl from Arizona, who has been
speaking for the last several minutes, that I appreciate his speech and
his very effective and diligent work. He cares an awful lot about
national security, about our defense capability, and about our
intelligence communities, and his position on what we need to do in
Iraq. It is not easy being a member of the Intelligence Committee
sometimes. It takes a lot of extra meetings, a lot of briefings, and an
awful lot that you can't talk about. For a Member of the Senate, that
is tough. But Senator Kyl certainly does a good job in that effort.
[...]
