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CounterPunch
February
26, 2003
Colin Powell's Blurry Pictures
Former
CIA Analyst Asks: "Are Intelligence Analysts Still Free
to Tell It Like It is?"
by RAY McGOVERN
Former
CIA analyst
After what seemed to be a triumph at the UN on
February 5, Secretary of State Powell has taken some major hits
to his credibility. His defensiveness can be seen in his undiplomatic
trashing of the French for being "afraid" to take responsibility
for making war on Iraq.
To what can we attribute Powell's "losing
it" with the French and the drop in his credibility?
One obvious factor was his strained attempt
to connect a rosary of dots in order to establish a connection
between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The unintended consequence was to
show once again that the evidence described by Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld as "bulletproof" is in fact full of
holes. But that was generally known.
What was unexpected was the way Powell
played fast and loose interpreting the imagery he displayed at
the Security Council. You would think he would have known better.
For his penance Powell had to sit still
on February 14, while a Council employee gave him a lecture from
the textbook for Rhetoric 101. Chief UN weapons inspector Hans
Blix poked an embarrassing hole in the conclusion Powell drew
from two satellite images of an Iraqi chemical facility.
Powell had shown that decontamination
trucks seen on the first image were no longer present on the
second, which was taken on December 22, the day a UN inspection
team arrived. He offered this sequence as evidence that Iraq
"had been tipped off to the forthcoming inspections."
On Friday, Blix calmly pointed out that
"the two satellite images of the site were taken several
weeks apart," something Powell had neglected to mention.
Hence, said Blix, the removal of the trucks--whenever it actually
took place-- "could just as easily have been a routine activity."
Powell offered no rebuttal.
The irony is that he did not need to
overreach the evidence. Proving that Iraq was in violation of
UN Security Council Resolution 1441 was a no-brainer. Blix had
already done so a few days before Powell spoke on February 5.
But the White House apparently decided
that if Saddam Hussein's perfidy could be proven three times
over, the result would be an automatic Ergo for war.
Predictably, this backfired--not only
at the UN but also in the streets of the world's major cities.
Skepticism leapt from the placards carried by millions of marchers--particularly
those of "Old Europe," who were "not born yesterday,"
as Harry Truman used to say.
Imagery intelligence is likely to play
an increasingly important role in coming weeks, so it is worth
giving some attention to the pressures that can make its interpretation
and public release suspect. In his autobiography, Colin Powell
included a highly instructive vignette from the Gulf War in 1991.
US forces were having no luck finding
and destroying Iraqi Scud surface-to-surface missiles before
they could be launched at Israel and elsewhere. So it was with
welcome surprise that Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs, learned that Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf had told the press
that several Scuds had been located and destroyed on their launchers.
Before Powell had time to rejoice, though,
his intelligence chief warned that an imagery analyst on Schwarzkopf's
own staff had concluded that what had been destroyed were not
Scuds but oil tanker trucks. Powell called Schwarzkopf at once,
but Schwarzkopf badmouthed the imagery analyst and delivered
himself of such a rich string of expletives that Powell decided
to let the story stand--a decision he regretted the next day
when CNN showed photos of the destroyed Jordanian oil tankers.
What about now? Where can Powell now
turn for imagery analysis not subject to command influence or
the exigencies of policy?
Nowhere. The Central Intelligence Agency's
National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) offered that
service until 1996, when CIA Director John Deutch ceded it--lock,
stock, and barrel--to the Pentagon.
One practical effect was the immediate
departure, in droves, of seasoned imagery analysts who moved
to other jobs at CIA. The damage could be seen all too plainly
in the years that followed: in the failure to detect India's
preparations to test a nuclear weapon in 1998, for example, and
in the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in
1999.
In this light, Powell's emphasis, in
his UN speech, on the importance of the "years and years
of experience" needed by imagery analysts had a poignant
ring to those of us who witnessed the demise of NPIC--proud discoverer
of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and guarantor of "trust-but-verify"
strategic arms control agreements.
The independence enjoyed by NPIC to resist
command influence and departmental bias was as important an asset
as the long years of experience of its veteran analysts. Are
there imagery analysts who are still free to "tell it like
it is," experts with some assurance that their careers will
not suffer if the evidence leads them to unwelcome conclusions?
(Someone should look into what happened to that imagery analyst
on Schwarzkopf's staff who made the correct call on the Scud-like
oil tankers in 1991.)
Whether the non sequitur for which Powell
was gently chided by Dr. Blix was a result of inexperience, a
desire to please, or both, Powell and other senior policymakers
need to look with jaundiced eye on the imagery intelligence coming
out of the Pentagon.
And so do we all.
Ray McGovern
worked as an all-source analyst at CIA for 27 years. He is now
co-director of the Servant
Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington,
DC. He can be reached at: mcgovern@slschool.org
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