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By Root 671 0

of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), led to an increased use of outside commissions to provide assessments of intelligence. In the United States, great political pressure was brought to bear on President George W. Bush to appoint a commission to investigate intelligence performance before September 11, after Congress’s joint inquiry reported to little satisfaction on anyone’s part. Similarly, after the Iraq controversy, Bush appointed a WMD commission. The prime ministers of Britain and Australia also appointed commissions to look into intelligence on Iraq. Britain’s Butler Report concluded that few reliable sources were available on Iraqi WMD programs, especially human resources. Lord Butler and his colleagues found that the intelligence assessments made good use of the intelligence they did have, although much of it was inferential. As was the case in the United States, analysts did not have complete knowledge of the background of key human resources. The report also found that there was no politicization of intelligence. Australia’s Flood Report made similar findings, noting the paucity of information—much of which came to Australia from the United States or Britain, and the failure to examine the political context in Iraq as well as the technical issue of WMDs—a criticism that some have made regarding U.S. intelligence, including director of the CIA (DCIA) Gen. Michael Hayden during his 2006 confirmation hearings. The Flood Report doubted, however, that better intelligence processes would have led to the correct conclusion about the state of Iraqi WMDs. The report also noted that there was no evidence of politicized intelligence.

A fitting conclusion to this issue, which will likely haunt the intelligence agencies in all three countries for years to come, is the report of Charles A. Duelfer, who headed the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) for the DCI. The ISG spent two years in Iraq examining the state of Iraqi WMDs after the occupation of Baghdad. Duelfer had been a senior member of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), charged with overseeing the disarmament of Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, until it was ejected by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in 1998. Duelfer concluded that Saddam was determined to obtain WMDs but would wait until United Nations sanctions had been lifted. But to achieve that goal, Saddam wanted to preserve the capacity to reconstitute WMDs, especially missiles and chemical weapons, as quickly as possible once the sanctions were gone. Finally, Saddam sought to create a state of strategic ambiguity, seeking to convince Iran that Iraq had WMDs as a means of deterring Iran while Iraq remained weak. If Duelfer’s assessments are correct, then one could argue that the intelligence agencies were accurate in their assessment of Saddam’s intentions but not the state of his inventory and that they correctly picked up the signs that he was transmitting that he had WMDs. They were not able to see through them, however.

The increased use of these commissions raises several issues. First, the commissions are, almost by definition, political in nature. A government is either trying to gain some political advantage or bowing to political pressure in creating a commission. Second, given that commissions are created by a sitting government, the issue of a commission’s objectivity always arises. This is usually addressed by appointing a range of commissioners whose political views or backgrounds are diverse. But this raises a third issue. How much expertise do they bring to the subject? Intelligence, like any other profession, has its own vocabulary and its own practices, some of which are difficult for an outsider to comprehend or to learn with much facility over the course of an investigation. If too many former intelligence professionals are appointed, the commission will appear to be biased. But if most of the commissioners have little or no intelligence experience, their ability to investigate in a meaningful and perceptive manner may suffer. Finally, the political circumstances that create the commission