Cont'd - Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball"

CONT'D FROM: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7452510/

MR. RUSSERT: Two days later you were on MEET THE PRESS, both of you, and I asked you specifically about phase two of your investigation, looking into the shaping of intelligence, and you said this.

(Videotape, July 11, 2004):

SEN. ROBERTS: Even as I'm speaking, our staff is working on phase two and we will get it done.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: When will we see phase two of your investigation about the shaping or exaggeration of intelligence by policy-makers?

SEN. ROBERTS: I hope this doesn't take too long. There are three phases to phase two. One is to compare the public statements by the administration on all public officials, including the Congress, with the intelligence matrix that we have. Why did you say what you said in regards to some administration official, in regards to some policy-making? And you can go back over some declarative and aggressive statements. Also you can find the same people who are the very top critics of those comments making the same comments. And so you get down to: Did the intelligence--was it really credible? No. It was a mistake. That influenced the comments of the people concerned.

Now, we can put out 50 different statements by the administration, which we've been provided by the Democrats, and we can also put out 50 different statements by members of Congress, including me--I don't know about Jay, but I think that's the case--and say: "What was in your head? What were you thinking? What was the use of it?" My whole point is--and also to get back to the pressure--the pressure question really involves repetitive questioning. In my view, there wasn't enough repetitive questioning to make sure that the analysts at the DOE, State Department, whatever, that those concerns were put into the national intelligence estimate. I don't think that repetitive questioning of analysts, which they expect, amounts to pressure.

Now, there's two more things. One is the Office of Special Plans under the Department of Defense. Now, we've had a statement basically saying that some of the activities may have been illegal. Everybody down there got a lawyer. I would love to get Doug Feith, who is the undersecretary in charge of the Office of Special Plans, back before the committee. We are willing and able to do that anytime that the minority wishes.

And finally, there's the prewar intelligence on the postwar insurgency in Iraq. We have found to date that that was scattered all over the place. Everybody expected a humanitarian wave of assistance. It didn't happen. So they got that wrong, too. All three things we can complete, but we do also have the confirmation of the DNI working with the Intelligence Reform Act, being much more aggressive in terms of the capability of the hard targets that certainly face America. And to go back in and to keep going over this over and over again, I'm more than happy to finish this, and I want to finish it, but we have other things that we need to do.

MR. RUSSERT: But as you well know, when your report came out there were many people who said that you were not going forward with phase two about exaggerations and shaping because you didn't want to involve yourself, influence the election. You made a firm commitment to do just that.

SEN. ROBERTS: Yeah, we're going to do that, Tim.

MR. RUSSERT: The United States went to war...

SEN. ROBERTS: Tim, we're going to do that. I will bring it here. We'll have the 50 statements. We'll have the intelligence. We can match it up and you can do it with members of Congress, who are very, very critical, who made the same things, and you can say, "OK," and you'll say "Well, Pat, it just looks to me that the intelligence was wrong and that's exactly why they said what they said." Now, I don't know what that accomplishes over the long term. I'm perfectly willing to do it, and that's what we agreed to do, and that door is still open. And I don't want to quarrel with Jay, because we both agreed that we would get it done. But we do have--we have Ambassador Negroponte next week, we have General Mike Hayden next week. We have other hot-spot hearings or other things going on that are very important. So we will get it done, but it seems to me that we ought to put it in some priority of order, and after we do get it done I think everybody's going to scratch their head and say, "OK, well, that's fine. You know, let's go to the real issue."

MR. RUSSERT: Will it be done?

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: I hope so. Pat and I have agreed to do it. We've shaken hands on it, and we agreed to do it after the elections so it wouldn't be any sort of sense of a political attack. I mean that was my view; it shouldn't be viewed that way. I view use of intelligence, as I said at the beginning of this section, as absolutely critical. I don't care how good or bad an intelligence product you have. If policy-makers are going to misuse or shape or hype or change or try to pressure that intelligence into being something different, they're the ones who decide, the policy-makers, whether we'll go to war or not, not the intelligence community. This is at the core of what we have to be prepared for, to do correctly for the next 30 or 40 years during the war on terrorism.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me raise another issue. Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the former Iraqi exile, said repeatedly that he and his organization had no ties with this defector called Curveball. Now, The Los Angeles Times wrote an article; several times on this program, we made that association. He now feels exonerated saying that this report says no connection between Mr. Chalabi and Curveball. Is that accurate?

SEN. ROBERTS: Basically I think that we're going to find a lot more out about Curveball and what has happened here with the WMD Commission and then our investigation, there are gaps. And the WMD Commission has found out things that we were not able to do a year ago. We have a promise from the head of the CIA, Mr. Porter Goss, who is looking into who knew about Curveball and the fact that he was not a credible source in terms of any collection or any kind of intelligence. We're still exploring that. As soon as we get to the bottom of it, I think that I could answer you better.

MR. RUSSERT: But, in fact, for the record, there's no evidence that Mr. Chalabi was associated with Curveball.

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Chalabi's footprints are all over virtually everything. I mean, where you have defectors, where you have, as Curveball was called, a fabricator, you're likely to find somewhere Chalabi's footprint.

MR. RUSSERT: But the report says there was no direct involvement with Curveball or linkage to...

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: So what does "direct involvement" mean?

MR. RUSSERT: Well, here's the way The Wall Street Journal wrote it, and we can talk about it: "Post- war investigations concluded that Curveball's reporting was not influenced by, controlled by, or connected to, the INC, (Iraqi National Congress). Overall, the CIA's post-war investigations revealed that INC-related sources had a minimal impact on pre-war assessments. The report's larger conclusion is that the CIA's intelligence on Iraq was faulty almost from start to finish, never mind Curveball. The attempt to finger Mr. Chalabi and the ideologues at the Pentagon was an exercise in blame-shifting to deflect attention from that enormous failure."

If there's no connection, it should be so stated.

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Well, the fact that they stated that there was no connection is another way of saying that in so much of the other intelligence, which the administration was accepting, especially in the Office of Special Plans, Douglas Feith, came directly from Chalabi. And, in fact, Douglas Feith, who's no longer in that position, refused to tell the Central Intelligence Agency about what he was learning from Chalabi and took it directly to the White House, including the vice president.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me read one last thing from the report. This is from USA Today. "The commission made it clear it is concerned about the quality of intelligence on nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. `The intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors. In some cases, it knows less than it did five or 10 years ago.'"

It's so damning of our intelligence agencies, and yet in terms of balance, this is the same intelligence agency that took down A.Q. Kahn and his whole international network, took down the Taliban in Afghanistan. That kind of intelligence data helped our military. Libya with Qaddafi--their espionage helped bring about a resolution. Is that accurate that we know less now than we did five or 10 years ago?

SEN. ROBERTS: In certain aspects and certain targets, that may be true. One of the most disturbing things that I read and that we both agree on in regards to the WMD Commission is that, in terms of the hard targets--and we'll just be very frank, Iran, North Korea, whatever--that we still know disturbingly little. Now, that was, you know, a quote by the commission. I can tell you that steps are being taken to improve that.

Again, rather than look in the rearview mirror with 20/20 hindsight--and if you're in the intelligence community, it's very easy to take a brick bat because there's been a lot of what we call, "Oh, my God hearings," "Oh, my God, how did this happen?" and then it gets in the press. But the intelligence community and all the people that work for the intelligence community can't ever tell what they have done right. Now, you have just cited some of them. So, yes, we have problems, but in the recommendations, better human intelligence, better analysis, certainly a better consensus threat analysis to the policy-maker. Make sure our technology is up to speed. There's 74 recommendations. There's about eight of them that we both agree on. We can put that in our authorization bill. We can work with the administration to make sure that it is put in administratively. Some things the intelligence community has done have been great successes and we can't talk about. Others like this are egregious mistakes that must be corrected.

MR. RUSSERT: Can this president or the next president go before the country and the world and say, "I have data, intelligence, information, that says X, Y and Z about North Korea and Iran and, therefore, we have to take action"? Can he or she say that and be believed by this country or the world?

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Those are two questions, and I think the answer to each of those questions is probably at this point no. In the unclassified version of this report, as Pat Roberts has correctly said, they say that our state of knowledge about certain countries is very, very bad, as indeed after the U.N. people pulled out of Iran, we really didn't have any assets on the ground, so to speak, to help us there. But I think the point of this, Tim--my colleague and good friend Pat Roberts just talking about looking in the rearview mirror--this is a seminal change since 1947 when the National Security Act was passed. Everything in intelligence and how the policy-makers respond to it has changed. There has to be a good deal of looking in the rearview mirror so that we can find out what we did wrong, not for the sake of playing gotcha but for the sake of finding out what we did wrong so we can correct it for the next 30 or 40 years.

MR. RUSSERT: That has to be the last word. Senator Rockefeller, Senator Roberts, thank you both very much.

SEN. ROBERTS: Hey, don't forget Bob's book.

MR. RUSSERT: It's coming up next. Bob Dole and his new book "One Soldier's Story," another plug from a fellow Kansan senator. Our Roundtable on the legacy of Pope John Paul II and the future of House Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay all coming up right here on MEET THE PRESS.

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I'll bullshit 'em, you just back me up, make it look good!
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7452510/