<<Warning in Iraq Report Unread
Sat Jul 19, 7:03 AM ET
By Dana Milbank and Dana Priest, Washington Post Staff Writers
President Bush (news - web sites) and his national security adviser did not entirely read the most authoritative prewar assessment of U.S. intelligence on Iraq (news - web sites), including a State Department claim that an allegation Bush would later use in his State of the Union address was "highly dubious," White House officials said yesterday.
The acknowledgment came in a briefing for reporters in which the administration released excerpts from last October's National Intelligence Estimate, a classified, 90-page summary that was the definitive assessment of Iraq's weapons programs by U.S. intelligence agencies. The report declared that "most" of the six intelligence agencies believed there was "compelling evidence that Saddam [Hussein] is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort for Baghdad's nuclear weapons program." But the document also included a pointed dissent by the State Department, which said the evidence did not "add up to a compelling case" that Iraq was making a comprehensive effort to get nuclear weapons.
The unusual decision to declassify a major intelligence report was a bid by the White House to quiet a growing controversy over Bush's allegations about Iraq's weapons programs. The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is seeking to question White House aides after hearing from CIA (news - web sites) officials who said that Bush aides pushed to include contested allegations about Iraq's nuclear ambitions in Bush's speech. The CIA account was contradicted during yesterday's White House briefing.
Bush aides released eight pages of the NIE, including various findings supporting Bush's charges against Iraq: that Iraq was "continuing, and in some areas expanding," chemical, biological and nuclear programs; that it possessed forbidden chemical and biological weapons; and that it was likely to have a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade.
But the excerpts also show that significant doubts were raised about key assertions Bush made in his State of the Union address. According to the NIE, a consensus document based on the work of six agencies, both the Energy Department, which is responsible for watching foreign nuclear programs, and the State Department disagreed with another allegation, voiced by Bush, that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were for a nuclear weapons program.
The State Department's intelligence arm (INR) also offered a caustic criticism of the controversial claim, raised by Bush in his State of the Union address, that Iraq was seeking nuclear material in Africa. "(T)he claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR's assessment, highly dubious." The objection was included in an annex to the report. The White House did not release the full text of the objection. The allegation that Iraq sought uranium in Africa was in the main portion of the report but was not one of the report's "key judgments."
A senior administration official who briefed reporters yesterday said neither Bush nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) read the NIE in its entirety. "They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document," said the official, referring to the "Annex" that contained the State Department's dissent. The official conducting the briefing rejected reporters' entreaties to allow his name to be used, arguing that it was his standard procedure for such sessions to be conducted anonymously.
The official said Bush was "briefed" on the NIE's contents, but "I don't think he sat down over a long weekend and read every word of it." Asked whether Bush was aware the State Department called the Africa-uranium claim "highly dubious," the official, who coordinated Bush's State of the Union address, said: "He did not know that."
"The president was comfortable at the time, based on the information that was provided in his speech," the official said of the decision to use it in the address to Congress. "The president of the United States is not a fact-checker."
The partial disclosure of the NIE by the White House added new complexity to the controversy over whether Bush was backed by solid intelligence in making accusations about Iraq's weapons programs.
The allegations about Iraq's nuclear ambitions were particularly important as the White House made its case for war in Iraq, illustrating the urgency of confronting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites). "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," Bush said in Cincinnati in October. The International Atomic Energy Agency later challenged many of Bush's nuclear allegations and exposed as a forgery a document indicating Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger.
The senior official, who fielded questions for 75 minutes in the White House briefing room, presented a version of events leading up to Bush's State of the Union address that contradicted testimony given to the Senate intelligence committee this week by CIA officials. The official said that while the CIA successfully removed a specific allegation from an October Bush speech, that Iraq had sought 500 tons of "yellowcake" uranium ore in Niger, the CIA raised no objection to any statement about uranium in Africa in the State of the Union speech.
The official said that in the drafting of Bush's January speech, aides decided to attribute the uranium allegation to British intelligence because of a "stylistic" decision to provide sources for several allegations, "to make the speech more credible." The official said no draft of the speech mentioned specific amounts of uranium and said "there was not a sharing of various language or anything like that" between the White House and the CIA.
Alan Foley, a senior CIA official, told a closed-door hearing of the Senate intelligence committee on Wednesday that before Bush's State of the Union address, he called National Security Council official Robert Joseph to object to a line saying Iraq wanted to purchase 500 pounds of uranium from Niger, according to congressional and administration sources who were present at the hearing.
The official who briefed reporters yesterday said the uranium assertion in Bush's January speech was based on more than the British intelligence. The NIE, while saying the Niger claim was the work of a "foreign government service," also said "reports indicate Iraq also has sought uranium ore from Somalia and possibly the Democratic Republic of the Congo."
Officials from two government departments said yesterday that those claims were not verifiable, either.
As to the overall nuclear assessment, the NIE said, "Although we assess that Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them."
But the State Department, in its dissent, challenged the circumstantial nature of the other agencies' assessment: "Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, [the State Department's intelligence office] is unwilling to speculate that such an effort began soon after the departure of UN inspectors or to project a timeline for completion of activities it does not now see happening."
The White House official said the majority view prevailed. "When you get all six agencies, you take dissent into consideration, you note their dissent, but there is a majority judgment that's made," the official said. "It was made in this case, and that's why it was relied upon."
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