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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (34611)	3/15/2004 2:29:44 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793729

Senators' report faults CIA on Iraq By John Diamond, USA TODAY WASHINGTON — A classified Senate investigative report says U.S. intelligence agencies turned vague, incomplete information into firm warnings about the threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. CIA Director George Tenet and Sec. of State Colin Powell appear before the United Nations Security Council Feb. 5, 2003. Mario Tama, AP The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee raps CIA Director George Tenet and his top advisers at the National Intelligence Council for a prewar intelligence "estimate" that said Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, even though the intelligence behind that assertion was shaky. The firmness of that finding, set against the failure to find any weapons since the war, has become an embarrassment to U.S. intelligence agencies and led to criticism of President Bush. Though the report is still being edited and portions blacked out so it can be publicly released, Republicans and Democrats have agreed on its key findings, senators and Senate staffers said. "The picture in regards to intelligence is not very flattering," Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the intelligence committee, said Sunday on CNN's Late Edition. In a pivotal, Oct. 1, 2002, National Intelligence Estimate sent to Congress just before votes to authorize the use of force against Iraq, U.S. intelligence said Iraq "has chemical and biological weapons" and "if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." That judgment in the estimate's opening lines came even though no Western official had seen an actual chemical or biological weapon in Iraq since 1995. Spy satellite photos showed suspicious convoys but could not reveal what they were carrying, the report notes. Electronic intercepts suggested Iraqi officers were preparing for chemical war, but U.S. analysts overlooked the possibility that Iraq was expecting a U.S. or Israeli chemical attack. Reports from human sources indicated Iraq was producing chemical and biological weapons, but those sources were not under U.S. control, and some were known to be unreliable. "It is a shocking report," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a member of the intelligence committee. "There's got to be some accountability somewhere in the process for failures, for missing information, for ignoring information." Because of poor coordination at the top, different intelligence agencies distributed different assessments among senior policymakers, the report finds. The confusion contributed to statements by senior administration officials that were not always supported by most intelligence agencies. The committee report criticizes Tenet and the CIA for consistently seizing on the worst-case scenario of the Iraq threat and overriding the views of intelligence agencies in areas where those agencies had expertise. U.S. Air Force intelligence, for example, disagreed with Tenet's finding that Iraq's unmanned aerial vehicles were for use in launching chemical or biological weapons attacks. The Department of Energy's nuclear weapons experts were overruled when they raised doubts that a shipment of aluminum tubes intended for Iraq was for use in enriching uranium for nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said in TV appearances Sunday that assertions about Iraq's weapons capability were based on the information they had at the time. "We were presenting to the world the facts as we understood from our intelligence analysis," Powell said on ABC's This Week. On Fox News Sunday, he said, "I was surprised. ... We thought, and had every reason to believe, that those weapons were there." But Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, conceded at a Senate hearing last week, "It's clear that we were working in a situation where we had large gaps in information." Roberts said the committee staff that wrote the 310-page report and members from both parties agree that the CIA needs to improve the quantity and quality of its information-gathering from human sources, as opposed to "technical means" such as spy satellites and eavesdropping antennas. Senate Democrats demanded that the investigation consider whether the Bush administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat beyond the conclusions of intelligence reports. Roberts said the committee investigation has found no such instances, though Democrats have cited several.