What did the CIA know, and when did it know it?
OSAMA BIN LADEN
In his book, “The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism from al Qa’ida to ISIS,” former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell wrote that, during a briefing before the successful mission to get Osama bin Laden, he told President Obama he thought “the circumstantial case that Iraq had WMD in 2002 was stronger than the circumstantial case that bin Laden is living in the Abbottabad compound.” A colleague later told Morell that when he uttered those words, you could hear a pin drop.
THE IRAQ WAR
In the run-up to the war against Iraq, Morell writes, CIA analysts engaged in a number of exercises to see where information might lead. One paper was written purposefully to make the case that there were ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. The same team of analysts later looked at the evidence to see “where the evidence really took them.” That paper found no evidence of a working relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda before, during or after 9/ 11. When staff in Vice President Dick Cheney’s team tried to pressure analysts to go with the purposefully skewed report, analysts fought back.
THE WMD STRATEGY
Morell wishes he and other colleagues had applied the same skepticism to the question of whether Iraq had WMD, but “groupthink” and Hussein’s history of stockpiling and using WMD misled them. Did the White House pressure the CIA to cook up the WMD case? No, he writes. “The notion that we were telling the White House what it wanted to hear can easily be debunked. Look at the question of Saddam’s connections to al Qaeda. We held our ground and refused to go where the intelligence did not take us.”