Early June 2003: Vice President’s Office Pins Blame for WMD Claims on CIA

Shortly after Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed appears, citing an anonymous source as accusing the Bush administration of ignoring evidence debunking the White House’s claim of Iraqi WMD (see May 6, 2003), Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus contacts Vice President Dick Cheney’s communications director, Cathie Martin, for comment on the controversy. Martin alerts Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, that Pincus is “sniffing around” for information. As White House deputy press secretary Scott McClellan will later write: “The vice president and Libby were quietly stepping up their efforts to counter the allegations of the anonymous envoy to Niger (see June 2003), and Pincus’s story was one opportunity for them to do just that. [Cheney] dictated talking points to Libby, who used them in responding to Pincus.” Pincus subsequently writes a June 12, 2003 story that hinges on Cheney’s assertion that the CIA had never shared its doubts about the existence of Iraqi WMD with the White House. The article helps spin the controversy, fueling speculation that the CIA, not the White House, is responsible for the “erroneous intelligence” on Iraq’s WMD. Pincus does quote a “senior CIA analyst” who says that in the run-up to war, “information not consistent with the administration agenda was discarded and information that was [consistent] was not seriously scrutinized.” The White House does not like either of these versions of events—either it used faulty intelligence to craft its argument for war, or it deliberately lied to the American people to send troops into Iraq. [Time, 7/31/2005; McClellan, 2008, pp. 166-167]