New Criticism on Prewar Use of Intelligence
September 29, 2003
By CARL HULSE and DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 - The Bush administration, which has
been laboring to build domestic and international support
for its Iraq policies, is facing renewed criticism about
how it managed intelligence before the war, and internal
tensions over the leak of a C.I.A. agent's identity.
The debate over the rationale for the war was reopened by
leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, who have
delivered a critical interim assessment of how intelligence
agencies concluded that Iraq had forbidden weapons and ties
to Al Qaeda.
There were "too many uncertainties" in the outdated and
inadequate information underlying a National Intelligence
Estimate that the administration used to justify the war,
the senior Republican and the senior Democrat on the panel
said in a newly disclosed letter to George J. Tenet,
director of central intelligence.
At the same time, officials confirmed that Mr. Tenet had
asked the Justice Department to look into whether one or
more administration officials had leaked information to the
news media disclosing the identity of a covert C.I.A.
agent. Mr. Tenet's request was first reported by NBC News.
The agent is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former
ambassador to Gabon. It was Mr. Wilson who, more than a
year and a half ago, concluded in a report to the C.I.A.
that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to buy
uranium ore in Niger in an effort to build nuclear arms.
But his report was ignored, and Ambassador Wilson has been
highly critical of how the administration handled
intelligence claims regarding Iraq's nuclear weapons
programs, suggesting that Mr. Bush's aides and Vice
President Dick Cheney's office tried to inflate the threat.
The very fact that Mr. Tenet referred the matter to the
Justice Department comes as a major political embarrassment
to a White House that is famously tight-lipped, and a
president who has repeatedly vowed that his administration
would never leak classified information. White House
officials said today that they would cooperate in an
investigation if the Justice Department decided that one
was merited.
The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was
questioned persistently today about the House Intelligence
Committee letter, which was first reported today by The
Washington Post. She held to the White House position that
its prewar intelligence about Iraq was as solid as it could
be, given the difficulties of piercing the secrecy around
Mr. Hussein's authoritarian government.
"The president believes that he had very good intelligence
going into the war, and stands behind what the director of
central intelligence told him going into the war," she said
on the television program "Fox News Sunday." "Obviously,
this was the accumulation of evidence about Saddam
Hussein's weapons of mass destruction over a 12-year
period, information that was relied on by three
administrations, several different intelligence services,
and indeed the United Nations itself."
The new questions come at a particularly uncomfortable
moment for Mr. Bush. Only last week, the administration's
chief investigator into Iraq's arms programs sent back a
preliminary report that sketched out very little evidence
supporting the administration's case for going to war. That
has put the administration on the defensive as it is trying
to persuade Congress to provide $87 billion for the
military stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq and
Afghanistan, and to persuade other nations to contribute
troops and cash.
Several of the Democratic presidential aspirants seized on
the investigations today to try to chip away at what had
been, until the war, Mr. Bush's biggest political asset:
his credibility with Americans, which grew after the Sept.
11 attacks. A statement from Howard Dean, a leading
contender, was typical of the comments. "President Bush
came into office promising to bring honor and integrity to
the White House," he said. "No more promises. It's time for
accountability."
White House advisers are clearly concerned that the F.B.I.
may conclude there is reason to investigate the
intelligence leak. Ms. Rice said repeatedly today that the
facts were not yet known, and Attorney General John
Ashcroft has not yet acted on the C.I.A.'s formal referral
of the matter to the Justice Department.
But the mere charge may itself gain some political
currency. "There is blood in the water, and there are
people all over Washington who want to take advantage of
that," one senior official said.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who had
called earlier for an investigation into the disclosure of
the agent's name, said the inquiry should be "thorough,
complete and fearless."
"This was a despicable act," he said today. "Whoever did it
should go to jail."
The Sept. 25 letter to Mr. Tenet from the House committee
leaders could carry added weight because Representative
Porter J. Goss of Florida, the Republican committee
chairman and a former C.I.A. agent, is typically a
supporter of the agency and the White House.
The letter does note that Mr. Goss has a "fundamental
disagreement" with Representative Jane Harman of
California, the committee's top Democrat, on whether the
overall intelligence analysis was "deficient."
But the letter, arising from the panel's ongoing inquiry,
cited serious shortcomings in the intelligence on Iraq's
programs to develop illegal weapons and its ties to Al
Qaeda, two central justifications for the war.
"The intelligence available to the U.S. on Iraq's
possession of W.M.D. and its programs and capabilities
relating to such weapons after 1998, and its links to Al
Qaeda, was fragmentary and sporadic," it said.
A spokesman for the C.I.A. responded today, saying that the
lawmakers were wrong and that they had not done the work
necessary to reach such sweeping conclusions.
"The letter tries to give the impression that they have
done a whole lot of due diligence on this subject, but in
fact they have not really had significant hearings or
briefings," said the spokesman, Bill Harlow.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in a television
appearance today, noted that the Iraqi leader threw weapons
inspectors out in 1998, making it more difficult for
intelligence agencies to get hard information.
"From 1998 until we went in earlier this year, there was a
period where we didn't have benefit of U.N. inspectors
actually on the ground, and our intelligence community had
to do the best they could," Mr. Powell said on the ABC News
program "This Week." "And I think they did a pretty good
job."
In an interview this evening, Mr. Goss said that the letter
was intended to seek a C.I.A. response as the House inquiry
moved ahead and that it did not represent final
conclusions. He said it was his view that the intelligence
problems cited in the letter resulted from not having
enough human sources of solid intelligence to resolve
uncertainties and inconsistencies in the information
collected. "There were not enough assets on the ground," he
said.
The letter points to a "dearth" of underlying intelligence
about Iraq after 1998 and says intelligence experts held to
longstanding assessments about Iraq's capability. "The
absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and
their related development programs had been destroyed was
considered as proof that they continued to exist," it said.
The letter said that the committee extensively reviewed
allegations that administration officials had distorted
intelligence findings in making their public case for the
invasion but that the panel had no authority over
articulating foreign policy.
However, the letter said, if public officials misstate
intelligence, agencies have "a responsibility to go back to
that policymaker and make clear that the public statement
mischaracterized the available intelligence."
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