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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (172071)	7/20/2003 3:18:52 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1578015

Published on Saturday, July 19, 2003 by the Chicago Tribune Critics Note Shift In Reports About Iraq's Nuclear Plans CIA's Tone More Dire Under Bush by Knut Royce WASHINGTON -- During the Clinton administration, the CIA's annual reports to Congress on the global proliferation of weapons of mass destruction routinely cast Iraq as a problematic footnote--a country worth keeping an eye on but not an alarming threat. But the tone changed dramatically after George W. Bush became president, with increasingly longer narratives suggesting that Iraq was determined to acquire nuclear weapons. In 1997, the first year of the congressionally mandated reports, the CIA devoted just three paragraphs to Iraq, noting that Baghdad possessed dual-use equipment that could be used for biological or chemical programs. There was no mention of a nuclear weapons program. Last year, the section on Iraq ran seven times longer. It warned that "all intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons" and could produce a bomb "within a year" if the country acquired weapons-grade material. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress last week that no significant new evidence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction had been uncovered during the current administration. Intelligence sources agreed. The question of whether the CIA buckled under administration pressure as the White House prepared for war against Saddam Hussein's regime has become more sensitive in the wake of finger-pointing on why Bush's State of the Union address in January included a claim that Iraq had been shopping for uranium in Africa. A CIA spokesman Thursday repeated director George Tenet's public insistence last month that the CIA has maintained its "integrity and objectivity" throughout. He said that the longer and more urgent tone in the most recent reports indicate only that the CIA "wants to be relevant to the policy process." But intelligence experts say that the shift in the reports is more a reflection of the CIA's political sensitivity than outright altering of conclusions to support policymakers. "I'm afraid that the U.S. intelligence community, particularly the CIA ... is sometimes quite sensitive to the political winds," said Greg Thielmann, who retired in September as a senior intelligence official at the State Department. Thielmann, who is critical of what some believe to be the administration's willingness to exaggerate intelligence to support the war against Iraq, said that changes in tone and content refute the White House argument that there has been consistency in the claims over the past two administrations. Though similar language is used in certain passages over the years, some of the cautionary caveats are absent in the two reports issued under Bush. In the 2000 report, the last one issued by the Clinton administration, the CIA makes only a passing reference to Iraq's alleged nuclear program, saying it believed that Baghdad had "probably continued low-level theoretical" research and development. It said "most significant obstacle" for Iraq to produce a bomb was that it did not have fissile material. <red font=red>The next year, the Bush administration's report said that the intelligence community was "concerned" about "a reconstituted nuclear weapons program" and warned that Baghdad "may be attempting to acquire materials" to make a bomb.<font color=black> In 2002, it reported that Iraq was seeking to buy aluminum tubes that could be used in centrifuges--an analysis later refuted by United Nations inspectors and nuclear specialists--and, for the first time, said that Iraq "could produce a nuclear weapon within a year if it were able to procure weapons-grade fissile material." On Iraq's alleged chemical and biological programs, the tone also changes significantly under the Bush administration. In its 2000 report, the CIA acknowledged it did "not have any direct evidence" that Iraq had used the period since UN inspectors left in 1998 to reconstitute its weapons programs. That cautionary phrase is dropped in the 2001 and 2002 assessments. Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune ###