John Dean: Manipulating intelligence may be crime
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John Dean: "If there's been a political influence on [the CIA's] decision-making, that's when I think you get in trouble."
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(CNN) -- Critics of President Bush are asking whether his administration exaggerated reports about Iraqi weapons in order to build a case for war. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper talks to John Dean, a Nixon administration official who was jailed for his role in the Watergate scandal and has written an essay asking whether Bush could be impeached.
COOPER: John, thanks very much for being with us. For those who haven't seen this essay, this is a quote from an article that appeared on FindLaw, the legal Web site. In it you say "If Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he's cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause." Do you stand by that?
DEAN: I do indeed. I don't think anyone would really question that. If you look at the history of impeachment, if you look at what happened to Richard Nixon, let's just back up for a minute. One of the things that the House Impeachment Committee had put in the article -- the proposed articles of impeachment against Nixon -- was his misuse of the CIA and the FBI.
There were also any number of people charged during Watergate with felonies for misusing the agencies of government. There's a very broad ... criminal statute in the federal law that prohibits people in the White House from influencing or improperly obstructing the way an agency is normally functioning.
COOPER: Excuse me. The use of intelligence is sort of a tricky thing. I mean, intelligence often is vague, some of it can be very specific, but some of it is open to interpretation, and there is a lot of room for interpretation. What do you need to hear ... make up your mind either way?
DEAN: Well, there's no question that I've been in the business of evaluating intelligence. It is an art as well as a science, and a craft as well as getting the good data.
But what we have here is a situation where, if the CIA, which has a very clear statutory mandate as to what they're to do, and it says they're to interpret the national intelligence and do it in a way that they do not do it under the influence of politics. It's right in the statute. If there's been a political influence on their decision-making, that's when I think you get in trouble.
COOPER: But once the CIA, which is basically a reporting agency, has given over the intelligence to those who are making decisions, how that intelligence is interpreted, is frankly out of CIA's hands and is also open to interpretation?
DEAN: That's true. When you get that you've got a real question that comes up. Do you base your policy on intelligence, or is your intelligence used selectively to support your policy when it's a predetermined decision?
We had the impression -- after I lined up all those quotes of Mr. Bush -- that he was very clearly relying on intelligence to take us to war.
Now, what I'm saying is we don't know the answers to these questions. We won't get the answers for a while, but we've at least started the process. And I'm telling you if you get to the end of the line and you find manipulation of intelligence, that's when you get into the very troublesome area.
COOPER: And we will wait and see. John Dean, thank you very much for being with us. Appreciate it.
