Just Read, President W

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February 14, 2004
INTELLIGENCE 
Dispute Prompts Scrutiny of Bush's Daily Reading
By DOUGLAS JEHL

ASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — The highly classified digest that provides President 
Bush with his daily intelligence updates is being scrutinized within the 
government and Congress after criticism that the information Mr. Bush has been given 
on Iraq and other matters has not reflected a broad range of views, senior 
administration and Congressional officials say.
Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Senate Intelligence Committee, 
which voted on Thursday night to expand its inquiry on Iraq intelligence, have 
signaled their intent to examine the shaping and presentation of the daily 
briefing, the officials said Friday.
The inquiries were prompted in part by questions about whether prewar White 
House statements regarding Iraq and its illicit weapons were based on the best 
available intelligence on that subject, the officials said.
As much as any information the president receives from top aides, the daily 
briefing informs his view of the world, ranging across issues of terrorism, 
arms control, military events and more.
But under Mr. Bush, the number of intelligence agencies receiving the data 
was reduced, prompting complaints from senior officials in those agencies. 
They say that because they do not know what is presented in the digest, 
prepared by the C.I.A.'s intelligence directorate, they have no way of challenging 
information with which they disagree, administration officials said.
Under previous administrations, the heads of agencies like the State 
Department's intelligence branch and the Defense Intelligence Agency were among those 
who received daily copies of the briefing document.
In the prewar debate on Iraq, other agencies, particularly the State 
Department's intelligence branch, were more skeptical of the idea that Iraq possessed 
illicit weapons than the C.I.A. was, the officials said.
The C.I.A. review was announced in an unpublicized address at the agency this 
week by Jami Miscik, the deputy director for intelligence, who said it would 
focus on the "quality and approach taken" in the preparation of the digest, 
formally known as the President's Daily Brief, or P.D.B.
The separate review by the Senate committee will consider whether the digests 
presented the White House with an accurate picture of prewar intelligence on 
Iraq, and whether they adequately reflected the views of intelligence agencies 
outside the C.I.A., senior congressional officials said.
In a telephone interview on Friday, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West 
Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate panel, declined to say whether the 
panel was seeking to read the highly classified documents. But a senior 
Congressional official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said "the P.D.B's have 
become a focus of greater interest on our part."
A senior intelligence official said that the briefings often spelled out the 
views of agencies other than the C.I.A. "if we know of competing views" and 
that the reasons for the disagreements were explained.
A senior intelligence official also said representatives of the Defense 
Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National 
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and others also took part in a daily planning meeting at C.I.A. 
headquarters in which the contents of the presidential daily briefing document 
were mapped out in general terms.
In her speech, Ms. Miscik said the C.I.A. review would compare the approach 
adopted under President Bush with the one in place until 2000 under President 
Bill Clinton. An overhaul three years ago "significantly improved the quality 
of the product we put in front of the president each morning," Ms. Miscik said, 
but the review would "see if some of the strong points of our earlier 
approach have been lost."
Ms. Miscik did not publicly describe the nature of the earlier changes. But a 
senior intelligence official said that under Mr. Bush, the intelligence 
digest included more operational, real-time information than before, including 
detail about the sources of intelligence that could not have been shared with a 
larger audience.
Intelligence officials said the C.I.A. review would not address the question 
of how widely the briefing should be distributed, a decision they said was up 
to the White House. But Congressional officials said that the Senate 
intelligence panel would be likely to address that issue.
A White House spokesman, Sean McCormack, said: "The P.D.B. is a product 
prepared for the president, and each president decides the distribution of the 
P.D.B. President Bush decided at the start of his term that only his closest and 
most senior advisers should receive copies."
On Thursday night, that Senate panel voted unanimously to expand the scope of 
its inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, to address not only whether the 
intelligence was well founded but whether public statements and testimony on Iraq by 
government officials "were substantiated by intelligence information."
The contents of the president's daily brief are so closely held that most 
Congressional and administration officials who have raised questions about the 
briefings given to Mr. Bush acknowledge that they have never been permitted to 
see the document. They say they do not know if the briefings on Iraq and other 
subjects reflected the general consensus of the intelligence community.
The White House asserts that the documents are covered by executive 
privilege. Even members of the Congressional commission that is investigating the Sept. 
11 attacks on the United States have been permitted only limited access to 
the documents, under highly restricted circumstances.
The staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee still has not yet been able to 
strike an agreement with the White House that would allow it to review copies 
of the briefings on Iraq in the months before the war, as part of its 
broadened effort to compare the administration's public statements with prewar 
intelligence.
A joint statement issued by Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is 
the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and Mr. Rockefeller said that 
other new areas the panel would review would include the role played by the Iraqi 
National Congress in providing information to intelligence agencies.
Some of the defectors introduced to American intelligence officers by the 
exile organization, which is headed by Ahmad Chalabi, were determined to have 
fabricated some of the information they shared about Iraq and its illicit 
weapons, according to intelligence officials.
Republicans had sought for months to block any widening of the Senate 
inquiry. In his own statement, Senator Rockefeller said that "a few outstanding 
issues" continued to divide Republicans and Democrats on the panel, but he said the 
two sides had "made a lot of progress."
"We will address the question of whether intelligence was exaggerated or 
misused by reviewing statements by senior policy makers to determine if those 
statements were substantiated by the intelligence," Senator Rockefeller said.


Quan