Another Coverup That Failed

Speaking of the freedom of pundits to change their minds, it is interesting to compare the Washington Post's David Ignatius today with that of 2002-3.

Last week Ignatius wrote a column about the Libby trial that was widely praised in the blogosphere. Ignatius observed that the trial lays bare the White House's attempt to cover up the existence of widespead opposition within the CIA to the administration's bogus pre-war intelligence claims:

Why was the White House so nervous in the summer of 2003 about the CIA's reporting on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger to build a nuclear bomb? . . .

The trial record suggests a simple answer: The White House was worried that the CIA would reveal that it had been pressured in 2002 and early 2003 to support administration claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and that in the Niger case, the CIA had tried hard to resist this pressure. The machinations of Cheney, Libby and others were an attempt to weave an alternative narrative that blamed the CIA.

But what did Ignatius have to say about the administration's effort to bully the intelligence agencies in 2002? He knew about it. And he advised the administration that it needed to bring those bureaucratic skeptics into line. In a column of November 1, 2002, Ignatius wrote:

Mobilizing the United States for war is hard enough, but it becomes truly difficult when the State Department, the Pentagon brass and the intelligence agencies are all, for somewhat different reasons, expressing doubts about the mission. . . .

At a time when the CIA is waging a global anti-terrorism war against al Qaeda, the Iraq talk strikes many intelligence officers as a dangerous distraction. CIA analysts fear that in its eagerness to find an Iraqi "smoking gun," the Bush administration may be "cooking" the intelligence -- that is, implying connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that have not been established.

Rank-and-file CIA officers "don't want to do this war," says one former agency official of his former colleagues. They fear, in part, that an Iraq war will jeopardize the "liaison" relationships with other intelligence services that are crucial in fighting al Qaeda.

If President Bush is going to lead the country into battle, he needs to begin by convincing his own national security bureaucracy.

A foreign and intelligence affairs correspondent working for one of the nation's premier newspapers knew that the administration was pressuring the CIA to produce false or misleading intelligence that would justify an attack on another country. And what was his reaction to that in real time? That pressure needs to be more effective.

Now that things have turned out badly, Ignatius can carp from the sidelines about the administration's "coverup that failed." But he's as implicated as they are. He assisted in the cover-up by not describing forthrightly what he knew at the time. He failed to follow the only moral course of action when a journalist sees an administration trying to cook the books to gin up an unprovoked war: expose the liars.