A rchive Date
[ 04-06-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/1936525
CIA examining intelligence about Iraq's weapons threat
By JAMES RISEN
Associated Press
June 3, 2003, 10:14PM
WASHINGTON - A top secret U.S. intelligence report last fall is now at the center of an internal CIA review to determine whether U.S. 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, 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 in 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 CIA 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 CIA is now in the process of turning over to Congress the documents that were used by analysts to prepare the national estimate, just as lawmakers in both the House of Representatives and Senate are preparing for their own reviews of the pre-war intelligence.
Traditionally, a national intelligence estimate is one of the most important reports produced by the intelligence community. It is designed to provide a forum for analysts from all of the U.S. 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 key analysts throughout the government lends the estimates special weight among policy-makers, including the president.
The review of last fall's intelligence estimate 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. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Tenet have been forced in recent days to defend their handling of intelligence in the months leading 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 Iraq-related intelligence.
In a statement issued by the CIA late last week, 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," Tenet said.
But several CIA 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 CIA analysts.
And some CIA analysts have said they felt pressure to make their reports conform to the Bush administration's Iraq policy.
Now, officials say that the CIA review team examining pre-war 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 pre-war intelligence, while the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence plans its own examination.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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