**PHASE II FACT CHECK: RESPONDING TO DEMOCRATS' KEY MYTHS**

***[The Truth about the Democrats' Additional Views]{.underline}***

**[Statements Report]{.underline}**

***Myth 1:** The statements report was "slow-walked" by Committee
Republicans and a draft report was never presented to the Committee
membership prior to the change in the Senate majority in 2007.*

**Fact:** **The Democrats were the ones who employed delaying tactics.
The statements draft did take a long time to prepare because of
excessive and extraneous information requests from Committee Democrats.
Here's the actual time-line: Committee members were presented with the
staff's work which compared the statements submitted by Committee
Democrats (nearly 400 statements) and Committee Republicans
(approximately 100) to the intelligence at a May 2005 business meeting.
Members were asked to judge for themselves whether the statements were
substantiated by the intelligence. Committee Democrats rejected this
plan and then insisted that the Committee interview policymakers before
any determination had been made regarding whether the policymakers'
statements were substantiated by intelligence. In November 2005,
Committee Democrats insisted that the Committee prepare a draft which
included "all" of the available intelligence, necessitating a new
document call for over 40,000 additional documents from the intelligence
community. This information was incorporated into a draft and circulated
to Committee members in September 2006, *before* the change in Senate
majority. (The majority knows this because they used that draft as the
primary source of intelligence information for their own report.)
Despite the demands from Committee Democrats in the last Congress to
include "all" of the intelligence, analyze 400 statements, and interview
policymakers, the majority's Phase II "statements" report does none of
those things. This suggests that these demands were mere delaying
tactics by the Democrats.**

**Myth 2:** *In the statements report "the Committee decided" to
concentrate its analysis on only statements from administration
officials.*

**Fact:** **The decision to review only those statements from
administration officials and to reject for inclusion statements made by
Democrats, including members of Congress and the previous
administration, was made unilaterally by the Committee Chairman. The
issue was never discussed by the members of the Committee at any
business meetings and the Chairman refused to allow a vote on a motion
offered by the Vice Chairman to include statements from members of
Congress.**

**Myth 3:** *Members of Congress did not have the same ready access to
intelligence as senior Executive branch policymakers.*

**Fact:** **All of the intelligence analyzed in this report was readily
available to Members of Congress. In fact, some of the intelligence used
for comparison to administration statements was *only* available to
Members of Congress because it was provided during closed Committee
hearings. Much of the other intelligence included in the report was from
major intelligence products with wide dissemination, including National
Intelligence Estimates---some requested by Members of Congress---and
daily intelligence products sent to the Intelligence, Armed Services,
Appropriations, and Foreign Relations Committees.**

**Myth 4:** *The "hastily produced NIE" on Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction capabilities was published "mere days" before the Congress
was scheduled to vote on the resolution to use force in Iraq and after
the Administration had made "repeated" pubic assertions regarding Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism.*

**Fact: The NIE on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities was
published nearly two weeks before Congress voted on the Iraq war
resolution and the key assessments had been briefed to members of the
Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, among others, a month before
the Iraq vote. Additionally, the judgments in the NIE were not new. As
the majority's own report shows, numerous intelligence assessments had
identical or similar judgments to those in the NIE months prior to its
publication. Finally, the majority report identified only two speeches,
not repeated statements, which discussed Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction and links to terrorism prior to publication of the NIE.**

**Myth 5:** *Senior administration officials repeatedly spoke in
declarative and unequivocal terms about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction programs and support for terrorists that were not
substantiated.*

**Fact:** Number range CHAPTERT**he intelligence assessments were
declarative and unequivocal in their assessment that Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction. The Committee's inquiry shows that statements by the
Bush Administration and other policymakers (including many Democrats)
that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, and had chemical and
biological weapons, including a mobile biological weapons program, were
substantiated by a large body of intelligence information prior to the
war.**

-   **While postwar information now indicates that the intelligence upon
    which these statements were based was wrong in many instances, the
    statements made by policymakers, both Republican and Democrat, were
    based on the intelligence assessments available at the time.**

-   **For example, a key judgment of the NIE, the Intelligence
    Community's most comprehensive assessment on Iraq's weapons of mass
    destruction was that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as
    well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left
    unchecked, it would probably have a nuclear weapon during this
    decade."**

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-   **The same Intelligence Community assessment stated that Iraq, "is
    reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," "has chemical and
    biological weapons," and "has mobile facilities for producing
    bacterial and toxin BW agents."**

**Myth 6:** *Administration officials made public claims that Iraq and
al-Qa'ida had an "operational partnership and joint involvement in
carrying out the attacks of September 11^th^."*

**Fact: None of the statements from administration officials claimed
that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had an "operational partnership" or claimed
"joint involvement in carrying out the attacks of September 11^th^." In
fact, administration statements about Iraq's links to terrorists and
connections with al-Qa'ida, in particular, essentially mirror the
intelligence analysis. Before the war, CIA described the
"Iraq--al-Qa'ida relationship," assessing that there were contacts
between Iraq and al-Qa'ida, that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with
training in chemical and biological weapons, and that al-Qa'ida members,
including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, were present in Iraq.**

-   **In September 2002, former DCI Tenet testified to Congress that:**

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-   **Iraq and al-Qa'ida have had senior level contacts going back a
    decade.**

-   **Iraq provided training to al-Qa'ida members in Iraq--of most
    concern in the area of chemical and biological agents.**

-   **Iraq is providing safehaven to al-Qa'ida members, including in
    Baghdad.**

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-   **Before the war, the CIA stated, "We have reporting from reliable
    clandestine and press sources that at least eight direct meetings
    between senior Iraqi representatives and top al-Qa'ida operatives
    took place from the early 1990s to the present. Several dozen
    additional direct or indirect such meetings are attested to by less
    reliable clandestine and press sources during the same period."**

[]{.mark}

-   **[The CIA also assessed that, "Reporting shows that unknown numbers
    of al-Qa'ida associates fleeing Afghanistan since December have used
    Iraq--including the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, Baghdad, and
    other regions--as a safehaven and transit area."]{.mark}**

**Myth 7:** *The Administration exploited its declassification
authority, knowing that others attempting to disclose additional details
that might provide balance or improve accuracy would be prevented from
doing so under the threat of prosecution.*

**Fact:** **In several instances Members of Congress requested the
declassification of intelligence analysis specifically, they said, to
provide a balanced perspective and inform the public. These members were
not "threatened with prosecution;" rather the information they requested
was quickly declassified by the CIA. If Members of Congress wanted
additional information declassified they could have asked. To pretend
now that Members of Congress were helpless in fully informing the public
is nonsense.**

**Myth 8:** *The Committee's Iraq investigation revealed how the
Administration applied pressure on intelligence analysts prior to the
war.*

**Fact:** **Number range CHAPTERThe Committee's July 2004 report
thoroughly examined the question of pressure on the analysts and
unanimously concluded:**

-   **The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration
    officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to
    change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
    capabilities.**

-   **Regarding terrorism, the Committee found that none of the analysts
    or other people interviewed by the Committee said that they were
    pressured to change their conclusions related to Iraq's links to
    terrorism.**

-   **The Committee found that after 9/11, analysts were under
    tremendous pressure to make *correct assessments, to avoid missing a
    credible threat, and to avoid an intelligence failure on the scale
    of 9/11.* In other words, analysts felt pressured to do their job
    accurately and not be sloppy-- something this Committee and the
    American public expects from our Intelligence Community.**

-   **It is noteworthy that the intelligence assessments about Iraq's
    links to terrorism from the analysts who felt pressured to make
    correct judgments, were, in fact, more accurate than the assessments
    about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, suggesting that such
    questioning is beneficial to the ultimate product.**

Number range CHAPTER**Myth 9:** *Statements about 9/11 hijacker Muhammad
Atta meeting with Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) officer al-Ani in
Prague in 2001 were not substantiated by the intelligence assessment at
the time the statements were made.*

**Fact: Vice President Cheney made three prewar public statements---on
December 9, 2001, March 24, 2002, and September 8, 2002---regarding
intelligence reporting of this meeting.**

-   **During the last week of October 2001, the Czech government
    publicly confirmed reports of the meeting.**

-   **In September 2002, the CIA assessed that, "some evidence asserts
    that Atta met with Prague IIS chief Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir
    al-Ani; other evidence casts doubt on this possibility."**

-   **It was not until January 2003 that CIA assessed that the "most
    reliable information casts doubt on the possibility" of the
    meeting.**

-   **It is simply false to claim that the Committee has any information
    that the CIA or any other Intelligence Agency produced an assessment
    prior to these statements discounting the Prague meeting.**

**Myth 10:** *The Bush Administration claimed that Iraq would give WMD
to al-Qa'ida or other terrorist organizations.*

**Fact:** **The Administration did not claim that Iraq *would* give WMD
to terrorists, rather that it *could*. Given that the U.S. Intelligence
Community judgments that Iraq had WMD and had known ties to terrorist
organizations, it was not unreasonable for policymakers to have concerns
that a rogue regime like Saddam's *could* give those weapons to
terrorists. As the Democrat statements above demonstrate, members of
both parties shared those concerns.**

**Myth 11:** *The key judgments of the October 2002 NIE stated that
Saddam had no current intentions of conducting terrorist attacks against
the United States.*

**Fact: The NIE did not make such a statement. The NIE did state:**

-   **Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the US
    Homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of
    the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge.
    Such attacks---more likely with biological than chemical
    agents---probably would be carried out by special forces or
    intelligence operatives.**

-   **Analysts concluded that if [Saddam Hussein perceived an inevitable
    and imminent U.S. attack on Iraq, he was less likely to feel
    constrained in his use of terrorism]{.mark}.**

**[Rome Report]{.underline}**

**Myth 12:** *The Rome report "details the intelligence activities of
Defense Department policy officials conducted outside the intelligence
community."*

**Fact:** **As bad as the majority's Rome report is, even it does not
claim that the Rome meetings or any other activities of the policy
office of the Department of Defense were "intelligence activities."
Nowhere in the report is such a claim made, nor is there any evidence
that suggests policy officials were involved in intelligence
activities.**

**Myth 13:** *The former Committee Chairman "farmed out" the Committee's
inquiry of Department of Defense officials to the DoD Inspector
General.*

**Fact: The former Committee Chairman asked the Department of Defense
Inspector General to examine two DoD offices named in the Committee's
agreed upon terms of reference in an effort to move the review, which
had become stalled after then-Vice Chairman Rockefeller accused
Under-Secretary Feith of possible unlawful activities (something
Rockefeller's own report now shows to have been a false charge). In the
end, it appears that Chairman Rockefeller found this DoD IG review to be
a suitable replacement for a Committee inquiry since he declined to
direct the Committee to review these activities and instead decided to
examine a Pentagon meeting about Iran which had little to do with
Under-Secretary Feith's office. If the Chairman truly believes that this
was "farming out" work that should have been handled by the Committee,
why did the Chairman not direct that this work be part of the
Committee's review?**

**Myth 14:** *The DoD Inspector General performed, "extensive interviews
and a thorough review of documents" for its review of allegations that
Under Secretary Feith's office was engaged in intelligence activities.*

**Fact:** **The DoD Inspector General's review of Under Secretary
Feith's office was neither extensive nor thorough. In fact, during a
hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in which the Acting
Inspector General acknowledged that key individuals had never been
interviewed for his review, Senator Warner expressed "serious
reservations about the manner in which \[the review\] was conducted and
the thoroughness" of it. Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin assured
Senator Warner that his own Committee would "make up for any shortfalls"
in the IG's review. In addition to being a poorly researched inquiry,
the Inspector General's ridiculous charge that recommendations from a
policy office can be described as "intelligence activities" is
troubling. Such premise means that activities of agencies and
departments throughout the government that offer an opinion on
intelligence, including those of Congress, would be "intelligence
activities." Accepting such a definition of intelligence activities
would endanger Congress's oversight responsibilities and the
responsibilities of policymakers throughout the government to question
and challenge the assessments of intelligence analysts.**

**Myth 15:** *The Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered an "attempt by
DoD policy officials to shape and politicize intelligence in order to
bolster the Administration's policy of invasion in its July 2004
report."*

**Fact:** **The Committee's July 2004 report found nothing of the sort.
Rather, the Committee's report noted that 9/11 changed the intensity
with which policymakers should review and question threat information
and said that analysts should expect difficult and repeated questioning
from them. The Committee found that in the case of Iraq's links to
terrorists, such questions had forced analysts to review their work
which often resulted in finding previously overlooked information. The
Committee's unanimous report said it "found that this process---the
policymakers probing questions---actually improved the Central
Intelligence Agency's (CIA) products."**

**Myth 16:** *The Chairman's decision to focus its inquiry of DoD policy
officials on meetings about Iran, rather than the issues outlined in the
Committee's agreed upon terms of reference, was a "concession to the
Vice Chairman's request."*

**Fact:** **In a February 2007 letter, the Vice Chairman wrote to the
Chairman that he considered the portion of the Phase II inquiry of the
Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy "concluded" as a result
of the DoD IG's report clearing the Under Secretary of any unlawful or
unauthorized activities. In what turned out to be a prescient statement,
the Vice Chairman said that the Committee's pursuit of such a nebulous
and subjective inquiry into "inappropriate intelligence activities"
would assuredly draw the Committee backward into a bitter, partisan
debate. Chairman Rockefeller rejected the Vice Chairman's request to
focus on the other parts of Phase II and move on to real intelligence
oversight and reform. Despite the Vice Chairman's numerous and repeated
requests for an explanation as to why the Chairman was reviewing
meetings about Iran as part of the Committee's Phase II Iraq inquiry,
Chairman Rockefeller never once said that his decision was a
"concession" to the Vice Chairman, nor did he state that this was in
response to the Vice Chairman's letter. The first time this claim was
ever made was in Chairman Rockefeller's additional views.**

**Myth 17:** *The Rome meeting inquiry has been part of the Committee's
Phase II inquiry but had been "suspended."*

**Fact:** **Despite the Chairman's claims to Committee Members that
there was an agreement between him and the previous Chairman to examine
the Rome meetings as part of the Committee's Phase II inquiry, the facts
show this was not the case. A letter from the previous Chairman to
then-Vice Chairman Rockefeller in March 2006 stated, "You have asked to
restart the Committee investigation into the Pentagon's Rome meetings.
Clearly, this does not fall within the scope of Phase II. As you know,
the Committee reviewed this issue nearly three years ago and found that
it involved Iran and not Iraq. In addition, the Committee found nothing
which required additional investigation." While the previous Chairman
agreed to examine the Rome issue as part of regular oversight, he
considered the matter completed and closed when the reviewers found that
the meetings were related to Iran, did not involve the collection of
intelligence, and did not involve any violations of law or regulation.**

**Myth 18:** *The Rome report is based on numerous interviews including
interviews of those individuals who attended the Rome and Paris
meetings.*

**Fact:** **The Chairman refused to instruct the Committee's review team
to conduct or even request several necessary interviews, including an
interview with one of only two DoD officials who attended the Rome
meeting and the only DoD officials who attended the Paris meeting. The
Chairman refused to request interviews of National Security Advisor
Hadley, the Ambassador to Italy, the Director of DIA, Assistant
Secretary of State Armitage, Under Secretary of State Grossman, and
several other Pentagon and NSC officials. The review staff only
conducted an interview of former DCI Tenet at the eleventh hour, at the
request of the minority, and without the presence of any minority
staff.**

**Myth 19:** *The Rome meetings involved "clandestine meetings ...
between DoD policy officials and Iranians ... in which intelligence was
collected but kept from the Intelligence Community."*

**Fact: The majority's own flawed Rome report shows that the Rome
meetings were not "clandestine" nor did they involve the collection of
"intelligence." The meetings were conducted for informational
purposes.**

**Myth 20:** *The majority report shows that Pentagon officials
"undertook the collection of sensitive intelligence without coordinating
their activities or reporting the information they collected through
proper channels."*

**Fact:** **There were no "proper" channels to report information
collected in Rome because policy officials are not required to report
the content of their meetings to the Intelligence Community. As the
Committee report shows, these officials also were not required to
coordinate their activities with the Intelligence Community.**

**Myth 21:** *DoD officials' actions to "blindly disregard the red flags
over the role played by Mr. Ghorbanifar in these meetings and to
wall-off the Intelligence Community from its \[sic\] activities and the
information it \[sic\] obtained were improper and demonstrated a
fundamental disdain for the Intelligence Community's role in vetting
sensitive sources."*

**Fact: The minority's own report shows that there were no "red flags"
about Ghorbanifar's participation in the Rome meetings because neither
the DoD officials nor Intelligence Community officials knew that he was
involved in the meetings until after they occurred. In fact, the report
shows that once DoD became aware of Ghorbanifar's involvement as an
intermediary, it was viewed as a negative factor in the decision about
whether to proceed with further contact of the Iranians. Additionally,
DoD officials did not "wall-off" the Intelligence Community from their
activities. As the majority's own report shows, DoD officials provided
the information it obtained during the Rome meetings to the Director of
the Defense Intelligence Agency and put Mr. Ledeen in contact with the
agency directly so that he could provide DIA with any pertinent
information about the Iranians and the information they provided.**

**[Other Claims]{.underline}**

**Myth 22:** *The Committee's inquiry detailed how the Iraqi National
Congress attempted to influence policy on Iraq by providing false
information and how this information was embraced despite warning of
fabrication.*

**Fact: Number range CHAPTERThe Committee found no evidence that the INC
intentionally provided false information to the United States. The INC
regularly contacted Iraqi defectors. If a defector had information which
the INC believed might be useful to the United States, they referred the
defector to the United States government. Some of the information from
these defectors was determined to be correct, some was wrong, and some
remains ambiguous, even today. But, the INC never made an assessment
about the accuracy of the information provided by these individuals and
made clear that it was not in a position to do so.**

-   **Information from the INC and INC-affiliated defectors was not used
    in the October 2002 NIE key judgments about Iraq's nuclear,
    chemical, and missile programs. Information from one INC-affiliated
    defector was used, however, as corroborating reporting in the NIE
    judgment that Iraq had mobile facilities for producing biological
    warfare agents. The use of the defector, whom the Intelligence
    Community judged to be a fabricator, as corroboration of the mobile
    biological warfare program was a serious Intelligence Community
    error.**

-   **Information from the INC and INC-affiliated defectors was not used
    in any key judgment about Iraq's links to terrorism. Intelligence
    Community terrorism analysts discussed information from
    INC-affiliated defectors in its assessments about Iraq's links to
    terrorism, but described the information as "questionable" and
    "exaggerated."**

**Myth 23:** *The Committee's inquiry documented how the Administration
ignored the Intelligence Community's pre-war judgments of post-war
Iraq.*

**Fact: The Committee's inquiry found no such thing. The Committee did
not find that policymakers ignored Intelligence assessments about
postwar Iraq. The Committee's report showed that the intelligence
Community outlined a range of potential challenges an occupying force
would likely face in postwar Iraq and in the region, some of which
occurred. Some assessed challenges did not occur or occurred in ways
that differed from the assessments. The Intelligence Community outlined
so many possibilities, that some of them were bound to turn out right.
Such assessments that describe every potential scenario are not
particularly helpful to policymakers.**

**Myth 24:** *The findings and conclusions of the Committee's Iraq
investigation were an important catalyst in bringing about subsequent
legislative and administrative reforms of the Intelligence Community.*

**Fact:** **The Committee's first report on the *U.S. Intelligence
Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Postwar Iraq*
[was]{.underline} an important catalyst in bringing about reforms of the
Intelligence Community, but the subsequent five Phase II reports were
not. Not one of these reports has resulted in a single reform or
improvement to the Intelligence Community, demonstrating that the Phase
II effort was merely a political exercise.**

**Myth 25:** *Every effort was made to accommodate changes proposed by
all members.*

**Fact:** **The minority was excluded from the drafting of these reports
and deprived of any meaningful role in the work that produced them. The
minority was not provided drafts until two months after the majority had
reviewed them and the Staff Director had directed the review staff to
make substantive changes. From the time the drafts were circulated to
members on January 15, 2008 to their adoption on April 1, 2008, the
Committee did not hold a single business meeting where the substance of
the reports was discussed. The Chairman demanded that amendments on the
drafts be filed before staff discussions were complete and while several
issues remained outstanding that could not be addressed through the
amendment process. Despite being told that these issues were member
issues, the Vice-Chairman was denied the opportunity to raise these
issues with Committee members at the business meeting. The
Vice-Chairman, on behalf of the minority, had nearly 100 amendments
outstanding when the Chairman called a final vote on the reports. This
was hardly an effort to accommodate all members.**

**Myth 26:** *Of the over 170 amendments filed by the Vice Chairman, the
Committee was able to resolve or accept over half. The reports as
adopted reflected over 300 changes made at the request of the Vice
Chairman.*

**Fact:** **The Vice-Chairman had nearly 100 amendments outstanding at
the time of the final vote on the reports. If the report drafters made
300 changes to the majority reports, many of these were not at the
request of the minority.**

**Myth 27:** *The Vice Chairman's remaining amendments were requested
changes that would have gutted the report's conclusions, changed the
factual underpinnings of the investigation, and significantly delayed
completion of the long-overdue reports.*

**Fact: We agree that the Vice Chairman's amendments would have "changed
the factual underpinnings" of the inquiry---they would have made it
supported by facts and would have prevented distortions of the
intelligence and policymakers' statements that currently exist in the
reports. They would not have delayed completion of the reports because
the changes could have been made immediately---none of the amendments
filed required additional work or research from the majority. They would
not have "gutted" the report's conclusions; they would have made them
based in reality. Finally, even if the Chairman really believed these
things, there would be no excuse for denying the Vice Chairman's right
to offer his amendments.**