Analysis: WMD Panel Threatened Resignations

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Analysis: WMD Panel Threatened Resignations
Shaun Waterman, UPI Homeland & National Security Editor

Washington, DC, Apr. 15 (UPI) — Members of the presidential commission that examined U.S. intelligence failures told White House officials they would resign en masse if President Bush did not ensure that the nation’s spy agencies cooperated with their inquiry — and had to repeat the threat more than once.

Laurence Silberman, the federal judge who was co-chairman of the inquiry said he told officials, "If we did not get support from the White House at any time we ran into any difficulties, I and others would resign."

"I did occasionally have to remind the White House of the commitment I had made to resign," Silberman continued, saying he had done so to "focus their attention."

But he also said the president had backed the commission team, personally intervening to get the man they wanted as executive director when his existing boss, U.S. plenipotentiary in Iraq L. Paul Bremer, would not release him.

"When we decided we wanted him and we offered him the job, there was a problem — Bremer didn’t want to let him go — which required the president of the United States to arbitrate the decision," Silberman told a Washington breakfast organized by the American Bar Association Thursday.

When the judge was appointed in February last year, he recalled, there was much discussion of the fact that, unlike the Sept. 11 commission that preceded it, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction did not have subpoena power.

Silberman said some commissioners fretted that, without it, they might not get the cooperation they needed, but that he himself believed the threat of resignation was "a more effective sanction."

As it happened, the concern about not having subpoena power turned out to be unjustified, he said.

"Ultimately, I think everyone agreed that ... we did get good cooperation," he said.

One area of potential conflict that went more smoothly than expected, commission officials said, were the negotiations with intelligence agencies over how much material could be put in the public, unclassified version of the commission’s report.

Unlike the two recent major congressional inquiries into intelligence failures, the Silberman panel chose to write a declassified report, separate from the classified version, rather than do as the lawmakers did and publish the redacted version of their classified report, bearing the familiar-to-Washington-insiders black bars and boxes over the classified sections.

"It was an effort to create something more readable and less mysterious," Stewart Baker, the commission’s general counsel told United Press International.

Commission officials said they began with the classified version and then rewrote the text of sensitive parts so as to exclude or provide unclassified summaries of classified information. The consent of the agencies that provided the information had to be negotiated. The process took about a month

Silberman told UPI the two versions of the report were 90 percent identical.

Baker added that the commissioners were "surprised at how much could be discussed in an unclassified format."

That same day, Bush, answering journalists’ questions at the American Society of Newspaper Editors, praised the commission for striking a good balance between openness and protecting the country’s secrets.

"I think people following this issue were surprised that so much was declassified. And yet the — the Silberman-Robb commission made it really clear that had the other 10 percent been declassified, it would have created — it would have jeopardized our capacity to protect the country. It would have — it would have exposed sources and uses," Bush said.

On the other hand, critics charge that at least redactions enable the readers to see what is being hidden from them, and they say the commissioners missed at least one golden opportunity.

Three chapters of the report — dealing with the state of U.S. knowledge about the weapons programs of Iran and North Korea and with covert actions — were excised from the public version.

"By excluding them," freedom of information campaigner Steven Aftergood told UPI, "The commission missed an opportunity to help educate and inform the public on these issues," which he added were "of some urgency."

"Surely there was something they could have said on these important topics without compromising sources and methods," Aftergood concluded.

Commission officials said that — the excised chapters aside — the discussions of intelligence collection and the section dealing with proliferation had presented the greatest challenges in terms of classification issues.

"Those are the areas where there are the most omissions (from the classified version)," said one.

Aftergood congratulated the commissioners on bringing to light the interagency squabbles and turf battles that raged behind closed doors.

"That is the kind of information that would never make it through the regular declassification procedure," he said, "On almost every page there is material that (under normal circumstances) the agencies would jealously guard from other eyes."

But he criticized them for the way they had characterized a biological agent al-Qaida was working with.

"The whole business of ’Agent X’ puzzled me," he said. "Al-Qaida would obviously know what they were working on, and there’s enough information in the report that they could probably figure out what it is we know about. So the only ones left in the dark are the readers — the American public."

Aftergood also criticized the choice of the term "Agent X" to describe the bio-agent. "It sounds mysterious and omninous," he said.

Silberman said there were reasons why the commission had been as tight-lipped on this topic as they had been.

"But of course," he said, "I can’t tell you what they are."