Colin Powell: Opening Remarks on Intelligence Reform to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

By September 2004 the Bush administration was proposing an overhaul of U.S. intelligence gathering to prevent the type of failures cited in an investigation of Powell's 2003 UN speech. As a result of that investigation, in July 2004 the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its “Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Assessments on Iraq,” which devoted an entire section to discrediting many of the assertions Powell had made in his UN speech. On September 13, 2004, Powell appeared before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Senator Susan Collins of Maine (referred to as “Madame Chairman”), to support the Bush administration's efforts to reform the intelligence community. He begins by joining Bush's call to appoint a national intelligence director (called “NID”) and give the person in that role authority to determine the budgets for agencies included in the National Foreign Intelligence Program. This program, now called the National Intelligence Program, was not an agency, but the title referred collectively to the activities of the U.S. intelligence community. He also echoes aspects of his Powell doctrine as he explains his role as secretary of state, calling diplomacy—not military force—the “spear point for advancing America's interests around the globe” and the “first line of defense against threats from abroad.” Serving diplomacy, he adds, must be the first priority of the intelligence community.

Powell goes on to try to give the committee a picture of the kinds of intelligence needs the secretary of state and other agencies have, arguing that it is crucial that intelligence units be “attuned to the specific requirements of the agencies they serve.” He places considerable emphasis on objectivity and “competitive” analysis, in this way making a glancing reference to the intelligence failures associated with the Iraq War, often the result of excessive enthusiasm on the part of intelligence agencies to “prove” a foregone conclusion. He makes reference to “INR,” or the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, an intelligence agency that is part of the U.S. State Department. He goes on to point out that while the agencies of the U.S. intelligence community do many things right, they are not very good at “critical self-examination.” Again, Powell is suggesting that if the agencies had been better at objectively analyzing their findings, the United States could have avoided some of the mistakes it made in the invasion of Iraq. Overall, Powell expresses his support for an overhauled U.S. intelligence capability in which agencies work cooperatively, share information with one another, and coordinate their efforts. Indeed, many analysts believe that the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, might have been avoided had there been greater cooperation and coordination among intelligence agencies. Because of walls separating the agencies, with each agency pursuing its own investigations, vital pieces of information were not assembled; had they been assembled, the attacks might have been prevented.

During questioning from senators following his prepared remarks, Powell noted that no stockpiles of banned weapons had been found in Iraq, contrary to previous intelligence judgments. He went on to say that over the previous year he had found “some of the sourcing that was used to give me the basis upon which to bring that judgment to the United Nations were flawed, were wrong.” He went on to say that “the sourcing had not been vetted widely enough across the intelligence community.” What “distressed” him, he said, was that some members of the intelligence community “had knowledge that the sourcing was suspect and that was not known to me” (Pincus, p. A4).