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Stick to Your Facts, CIA

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The Central Intelligence Agency needs to provide decision-makers with the best facts and analysis possible, free of political interference. As the Bush administration prepares for possible war with Iraq, some analysts and members of Congress complain that intelligence officials are being pressured to supply facts that fit decisions already made, not the other way around.

George J. Tenet, CIA director in the Clinton and Bush administrations, denies that there has been any undue influence exerted on his agency. But intelligence and congressional sources told Times reporters Greg Miller and Bob Drogin last week that senior Bush administration officials were pressuring CIA analysts to come up with information that would make it easier for Washington to build a case against Saddam Hussein. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was named as an offender; a Pentagon official rejected the charges, saying Rumsfeld merely challenges assumptions and asks tough questions to ensure that briefers can substantiate their analyses.

Getting the facts is not easy, especially concerning a country like Iraq. The CIA has a dismal record in the Persian Gulf over past decades, having overstated the opposition in Iran to the clerics who toppled the shah and then underestimating Iraq’s threat to neighbors such as Kuwait.

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When the Reagan administration contended that the CIA under President Carter underestimated the threat from the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, a special panel came up with a more alarmist view of the data. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CIA was found to have overestimated Moscow’s military threat. It’s bad enough when cooked books lead to excessive spending to counter an enemy less powerful than supposed; it’s worse if lives are lost in unnecessary battles.

The extent of Baghdad’s contacts with Al Qaeda is in dispute, as is the severity of Iraq’s threat to other nations and the size of its arsenals of chemical and biological weapons. Evidence of its nuclear capabilities is ambiguous. Certainty is elusive, but the CIA must present analyses and interpretations based on all the facts gathered, not politically driven and preconceived conclusions.

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