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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (2311)	6/9/2003 12:43:30 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

White House Officials Defend WMD Intelligence Sunday, June 08, 2003 WASHINGTON — Bush administration officials on Sunday denied exaggerating U.S. intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in order to make the case for going to war. The officials promised that evidence showing Iraq possessed the banned weapons will emerge. “They have acknowledged that they had biological weapons," Secretary of State Colin Powell (search) said on Fox News Sunday. “And they never accounted for all that they had.” Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on Sunday morning news shows to counter last week's media reports that proof of the weapons had been weaker than the administration led the country to believe. The weapons of mass destruction argument was the primary reason the administration gave for waging war to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (search). At issue were excerpts from a September 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency document indicating that it couldn't pin down the location of chemical weapon production facilities and stockpiles but it had no doubt they existed. But other parts of the report said there was evidence that chemical weapons were being dispersed, Powell said on Fox News Sunday. "So there was a question as to whether or not you are talking about chemical weapons that are being dispersed, or a production facility," Powell said. "There is a judgment call there." The Bush administration has decided it will declassify the entire report so that all portions of it can be examined by Congress in context. Powell sidestepped the issue of whether or not the whole document will be made public. "I think we've put out a lot," he said. "I think the American people got a good, solid assessment." But, he added, "I'm sure that, as the intelligence community feels it is appropriate to declassify this information, it will be made available to the public. I don't think the public is as concerned about this as the media." Powell said that Iraqis have possessed weapons of mass destruction throughout history and have used chemical weapons. He told reporters that interviews with Iraqis involved in the weapons programs would bring evidence of their existence to light. "I think all the documents that are now coming forward will tell us more about what they have hidden and where they have hidden it," Powell said. Powell said the media, not the American people, were the ones saying that prewar intelligence had been hyped. "How can it be bogus when I can show you pictures of people that were gassed by Saddam Hussein?” he said on Fox. “I can show you reports where the Iraqis were caught lying about their weapons of mass destruction.” Powell and Rice also dismissed allegations that Vice President Dick Cheney pressured CIA (search) officials to exaggerate their reports of the Iraqi threat. Powell said Cheney – who reportedly made several trips to the Central Intelligence Agency -- was simply doing his job: delving into the issue to make sure he knew the truth. When asked where the weapons were, Rice said on NBC’s Meet the Press: "This is a program that was built for concealment. We've always known that. We've always known that it would take some time to put together a full picture of his weapons of mass destruction programs." She said intelligence offered solid justification for the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. She said only one conclusion could be drawn from the information gathered between 1991 and March 2003, when the war was launched. "And that was that this was an active program, that this was a dangerous program, this was a program that was being effectively concealed," Rice told ABC's This Week. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

To: calgal who wrote (2311)	6/9/2003 12:53:38 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 10965

Official rebuts story of Iraq intelligence shortcomings By James G. Lakely THE WASHINGTON TIMES URL:http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20030606-110951-3230r.htm The director of the Defense Intelligence Agency yesterday debunked the notion that a classified intelligence report had said the United States had no reliable evidence before hostilities that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The 2002 DIA report, leaked to the press this week, said intelligence officials could not pin down the exact location of Saddam Hussein's caches of chemical and biological weapons. However, Adm. Lowell Jacoby, the director of the DIA, said yesterday that didn't mean Iraq's banned weapons program was a myth. "We did not have doubts about the existence of the program," Adm. Jacoby said upon emerging from a classified intelligence briefing before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday. Adm. Jacoby said earlier press reports suggesting the United States had no reliable evidence of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons program were wrong and based on a "single sentence" in a DIA report that "was not intended to ... summarize the program." At the time the report was written, September 2002, the Bush administration was telling Congress that war in Iraq was necessary to force Saddam to give up his weapons of mass destruction and the ability to make more. Since the end of major military operations in Iraq in April, no weapons of mass destruction have been found. But several mobile labs with the capacity to produce deadly chemical agents have been located by coalition forces. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction has led many Democrats on Capitol Hill to charge that the Bush administration ignored intelligence reports that suggested a lack of weapons, or manipulated vague reports of the presence of chemical agents, to justify the war. There was no need to manipulate the reports, Adm. Jacoby said, because "clearly, there's a whole body of evidence" since the United Nations began inspecting Iraq at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war "that says they, in fact, did have a weapons of mass destruction program." The DIA report leaked to the press "is not in any way intended to portray the fact that we had doubts that such a program existed, that such a program was active, or such a program was part of the Iraqi [weapons of mass destruction] infrastructure," Adm. Jacoby said. President Bush said Thursday in a speech before U.S. troops at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar that "we'll reveal the truth" about Saddam's unconventional weapons program. Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barraso emerged from an Oval Office visit yesterday to say that Mr. Bush "told me he has the full confidence in the intelligence reports he received about the possessions of weapons of mass destruction by the former Iraqi authorities." Mr. Durao Barraso added: "I trust our allies," and that "moral grounds" apart from any Iraqi weapons justified the war. "From my point of view, the most important thing now is the fact that that regime is over," Mr. Durao Barraso said. "It's no longer a threat to anybody in the world. I think we don't need any kind of justification like [weapons of mass destruction] to justify the war. The mass graves that were discovered in Iraq after the allied intervention are in itself a justification for the war." Selected details of the classified DIA report were first reported by Bloomberg News. A summary from the report said Iraq "probably" had stockpiles of banned chemicals. Bloomberg reported that the report stood in contrast to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's testimony to Congress on Sept. 19 that Iraq had "amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin and mustard gas." Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the DIA report was taken out of context and that "further down in the text" it explained that Iraq indeed possessed stockpiles of chemical weapons. Mr. Warner said his numerous classified briefings have left him confident that the intelligence gathered before the war was accurate, despite the doubts of others. • This article is based in part on wire service reports.