Seymour Hersh has published a lengthy description of the way that intelligence was manipulated in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in October's issue of The New Yorker. Amy Davidson of The New Yorker interviews Hersh not only about his article but also about the current state of the Bush administration and what he might anticipate from the administration in the coming months. A couple questions and answers will give you a flavor of the interview and of the article. A link to that article is at the foot of this page.
Question: Was this, then, a matter of the Administration lying to itself as much as to anyone else?One of the great questions is "Were they lying? Did they know the truth?" And the answer, I think, to a large degree, is that, whatever they may have suspected, they didn’t know the truth, because the truth was simply impossible for them to see. The system had been set up so that they saw only what they wanted. And, you know, these people, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in particular, came to the office openly suspicious of the intelligence community and the bureaucracy. They thought they were too soft on Iraq, not tough enough with Saddam, not able to make the decisive choices. So what you have is a bunch of people who weren’t lying; they simply had fixed the system so it couldn’t give them information they didn’t want to hear. One of the intelligence guys I talked to used a wonderful analogy. He said, "It’s as if you all had gone into a planetarium and the software for the sky show had gone bad and you were seeing the wrong sky, and you walked outside, and you looked up and you said, ‘Hey, what’s going on. This isn’t right.’" And that’s what they had done: they had gone into the planetarium, they set themselves up with the wrong software, and then they were surprised to find that the rest of the world didn’t conform—the war began, and there were no W.M.D.s.
. . .
We’ve been talking about how the case for the war was made. Why does that matter now, now that we’re in there?
Well, for one thing, it matters because we have a system set up, a stovepipe system, that’s still in place. We’re still in a situation in which intelligence that doesn’t meet political criteria doesn’t get to the President, and in which people in high positions will take any intelligence that makes their case and move it directly to the President. It’s not a straight system. There’s still this incredible impasse.
. . .
Last week, the President said that the press was being too negative about Iraq.
Well, that’s because the stove-piped reports he gets are generally much more upbeat.
. . .
. . . Remember that the Administration, no matter how they twist the words or spin the words, told us we’d find weapons in Iraq. They believed it. That was the intelligence they got. And, to me, the fact that they weren’t lying and really believed it is as alarming as if they had been lying. It’s very, very troubling. [Emphasis added]
I do not share Hersh's sanguine view of Cheney and Bush as targets, perhaps even as victims; I see them as complicit in the system. And, as Hersh points out, that system is still in place with severe implications for American foreign policy in the coming months.
But, read it and make your own judgment.
If you would like to read Hersh's article in its entirety, follow this link: The Stovepipe