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News :: Regime |
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Iraq Arms Report Now The Subject Of A C.I.A. Review |
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by James Risen (NYTimes) via rporter
Email: rporter (nospam) newtonbigelow.com (verified) |
04 Jun 2003
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WASHINGTON, June 3 — A top secret United States intelligence report last fall is now at the center of an internal C.I.A. review to determine whether American intelligence miscalculated the extent of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. The report had concluded that Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program.
The document, which was described by intelligence officials familiar with the review, provided President Bush with his last major overview of the status of Iraq's program to develop weapons of mass destruction before the start of the war.
The document, called a national intelligence estimate, was issued last October. It is significant because it provided the White House with the last attempt by the entire intelligence community to reach a consensus concerning Iraq's weapons programs before the war started in March.
The national estimate has been an early focus of attention for a small team of retired C.I.A. analysts who have been brought in by the agency's director, George Tenet, to assess the accuracy of the intelligence reports produced before the war, according to officials familiar with the review. Separately, the C.I.A. is now in the process of turning over to Congress the underlying documents that were used by analysts to prepare the national estimate, just as lawmakers in both the House of Representatives and the Senate are preparing for their own reviews of the prewar intelligence.
Traditionally, a national intelligence estimate is one of the most important reports produced by the intelligence community. It is intended to provide a forum for analysts from all of the different American intelligence agencies to express their differences on a specific topic and then reach a position on an assessment on which they can agree. Such broad-based involvement from top analysts throughout the government lends the estimates special weight among policy makers, including the president.
The review of the intelligence estimate made last fall comes as the failure to find Iraq's weapons of mass destruction so far is flaring into a major political issue for the Bush administration. Both Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Mr. Tenet have been forced in recent days to defend their handling of intelligence in the months that lead up to the war. At the same time, intelligence analysts inside the government continue to complain about the role played over the past year by a special Pentagon unit that provided policy makers with an alternative, and more hawkish, view of intelligence related to Iraq.
In a prepared statement issued by the C.I.A. late last week, Mr. Tenet denied that the intelligence on Iraq was warped in order to satisfy the Bush administration's desire to find evidence to support its policies. "The integrity of our process was maintained throughout, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong," Mr. Tenet said. But several C.I.A. officials interviewed recently declined to comment on or defend the actions over the past year of the Pentagon's special intelligence unit, which sought to highlight information from Iraqi exiles and other sources that had frequently been dismissed by C.I.A. analysts. And some C.I.A. analysts have said they felt pressure to make their reports conform to the Bush administration's Iraq policy.
Now, officials say that the C.I.A. review team examining prewar intelligence plans to ask the Pentagon for documents from the special intelligence unit to try to determine what its role was in shaping the intelligence during the months leading up to the war.
In Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committee have announced plans to conduct a joint inquiry into the prewar intelligence, while the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence plans its own examination. In a May 22 letter, the leaders of the House panel asked Mr. Tenet to provide answers to a series of questions on the issue, including whether the "sources and methods that contributed to the community's analysis on the presence and amount of W.M.D. in Iraq were of sufficient quality and quantity to provide sufficient accuracy."
One official familiar with the C.I.A. review said the answer to that fundamental question may be no. The official said it appeared that the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies had developed fairly solid intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs after the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and through much of the 1990's, as United Nations inspectors scoured the country.
During that time, the United States grew convinced that Iraq had chemical weapons, was trying to develop biological agents and was seeking to reconstitute a nuclear program that had been disrupted by the war. But the official said it now appeared that the quality of the intelligence concerning Iraq's weapons programs subsequently declined, particularly after the inspectors were withdrawn in 1998.
Without conclusive new intelligence to the contrary, it appears that the intelligence community continued to make projections assuming a continued Iraqi weapons effort, in line with its earlier assessments, the official said. The fragments of intelligence that came in periodically after the inspectors were withdrawn were never enough to prove that Mr. Hussein had abandoned his weapons programs, and so the natural inclination was to assume that those programs were still under way.
United States intelligence officials still caution that American forces may yet find conclusive evidence of Iraq's chemical or biological weapons. Mr. Bush has pointed to the discovery of two suspected mobile labs as evidence that Iraq was trying to develop biological weapons.
However, officials now acknowledge that at least some of the pre-war analysis was inaccurate. The United States had, for example, received reports indicating that Iraqi military units had received the authority to deploy and use chemical weapons against advancing American troops. But postwar searches of Iraqi military facilities and interrogations of Iraqi officers have failed to turn up any evidence that chemical weapons were deployed.
It was perhaps inevitable that the national estimate on Iraq's weapons programs would receive special scrutiny. Even as it was being produced last fall, the estimate was already at the center of a political struggle between Democrats in Congress and the C.I.A. and the Bush administration over the threat posed by Mr. Hussein's government.
Last summer, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Bob Graham of Florida and Dick Durbin of Illinois, asked the C.I.A. to produce a national intelligence estimate that would review all of the major policy issues related to Iraq. The intelligence community resisted, agreeing instead to produce one that was more narrowly focused on the status of Iraq's weapons programs.
When Mr. Graham, then the intelligence committee's chairman, finally saw the report, he asked that its findings be declassified in time for the Senate debate on a resolution to support the war in Iraq. When Mr. Tenet provided a letter to Mr. Graham that included some of the report's findings, Mr. Graham complained that only those findings that supported the administration's position on Iraq had been declassified, while others that raised questions were not.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |
