C.I.A. Director Defends Assessments of Iraqi Weapons
from NY Times [ritual sacrifice required]

After months of silence, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, has decided to mount a strong public defense of the prewar judgments made by American intelligence agencies about Iraq and its illicit weapons stockpiles, intelligence officials said on Wednesday.

In a speech scheduled on short notice at Georgetown University on Thursday, Mr. Tenet will seek "to correct some of the misperceptions and downright inaccuracies concerning what the intelligence community reported and didn't report regarding Iraq," an intelligence official said.

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offered his own defense of the Bush administration's prewar intelligence. Mr. Rumsfeld told Congress that he believed that the American-led team still searching for illicit weapons in Iraq might eventually find them despite comments last month by David A. Kay, the group's former leader, that no stockpiles of such arms existed in Iraq at the time of the American-led invasion last March.

The dual defenses come as the strongest administration response to Dr. Kay, and follow a stir caused by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's comment that he was not sure he would have recommended an invasion if he had known that Iraq did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons.

Mr. Tenet and Mr. Rumsfeld, both of whom played pivotal roles in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq, have often been at odds in debates over which should have the upper hand in intelligence matters, and their departments have at times disagreed about intelligence on Iraq. Now they appear to be allies in the administration's efforts to defend the prewar intelligence.

More

C.I.A. Director Defends Assessments of Iraqi Weapons
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 - After months of silence, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, has decided to mount a strong public defense of the prewar judgments made by American intelligence agencies about Iraq and its illicit weapons stockpiles, intelligence officials said on Wednesday.

In a speech scheduled on short notice at Georgetown University on Thursday, Mr. Tenet will seek "to correct some of the misperceptions and downright inaccuracies concerning what the intelligence community reported and didn't report regarding Iraq," an intelligence official said.

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offered his own defense of the Bush administration's prewar intelligence. Mr. Rumsfeld told Congress that he believed that the American-led team still searching for illicit weapons in Iraq might eventually find them despite comments last month by David A. Kay, the group's former leader, that no stockpiles of such arms existed in Iraq at the time of the American-led invasion last March.

The dual defenses come as the strongest administration response to Dr. Kay, and follow a stir caused by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's comment that he was not sure he would have recommended an invasion if he had known that Iraq did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons.

Mr. Tenet and Mr. Rumsfeld, both of whom played pivotal roles in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq, have often been at odds in debates over which should have the upper hand in intelligence matters, and their departments have at times disagreed about intelligence on Iraq. Now they appear to be allies in the administration's efforts to defend the prewar intelligence.

Mr. Bush himself has tried to deflect criticism of the intelligence. In a speech on Wednesday at the Library of Congress, Mr. Bush did not mention banned weapons, saying only that in deposing Saddam Hussein the United States had dealt with a dictator who had "the intent and capability" to threaten his own people and the world.

In back-to-back hearings of the Senate and House armed services committees on Wednesday, Mr. Rumsfeld became the first of Mr. Bush's top aides to testify to Congress since Dr. Kay made his assertions after stepping down from his post last month.

Mr. Rumsfeld sought to play down Dr. Kay's view that "we were all wrong, probably" in believing that Iraq possessed large stockpiles of illicit weapons before the war. Mr. Rumsfeld said that was just a "hypothesis" to explain the difference between the prewar intelligence and what has been found on the ground.

Other theories that weapons inspectors must now pursue, he said, are that Mr. Hussein spirited his illicit arms out of Iraq, buried them in hidden bunkers in Iraq, or was tricked by his own scientists and engineers into believing Iraq possessed weapons it did not have.

"What we have learned thus far has not proven Saddam Hussein had what intelligence indicated and what we believed he had," Mr. Rumsfeld said in the same words to both panels, "but it also has not proven the opposite."

Mr. Rumsfeld said the inspectors needed more time to track down leads in a country the size of California, noting that it took American forces 10 months to find and capture Mr. Hussein. "It's too early to come to final conclusions, given the work still to be done," he said.

Mr. Rumsfeld said that American intelligence "got it essentially right" when it determined that Iraq was desperately trying to build missiles able to reach beyond the 90-mile limit set by the United Nations after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

"If we were to accept that Iraq had a surge capability for biological and chemical weapons, his missiles could have been armed with weapons of mass destruction and used to threaten neighboring countries," he said. Surge capability means the ability to produce the weapons quickly on short notice.

Mr. Rumsfeld repeatedly defended the intelligence work on Iraq, saying at one point, "The intelligence community's support in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the global war on terror overall, have contributed to the speed, the precision, the success of those operations, and saved countless lives."

Mr. Rumsfeld faced sharp questions from Democrats who accused the administration of manipulating intelligence to suit their goal of toppling Mr. Hussein. "The debacle cannot all be blamed on the intelligence community," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. "Key policy makers made crystal clear the results they wanted from the intelligence community."

Mr. Rumsfeld told Mr. Kennedy that his assertions were baseless. "You've twice or thrice mentioned manipulation," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "I haven't heard of it, I haven't seen any of it, except in the comments you've made."

Mr. Tenet's planned address at Georgetown University, his alma mater, will come on a day when members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are scheduled to gather in a secure room in the Capitol to review for the first time a classified 300-page draft report by committee staff members that is expected to be strongly critical of conclusions that intelligence agencies drew about Iraq and its weapons before the war, few of which have been borne out by facts on the ground.

In an interview on Wednesday, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Republican chairman of the intelligence committee, said that the panel's eight-month inquiry had found the misjudgments to have been part of "a world intelligence failure" in which a basic assumption that Mr. Hussein's government possessed illicit weapons became "a runaway train that was very hard to stop."

Mr. Tenet's last public speech was in May 2003, and he has not yet testified before Congress, even in closed session, to defend the intelligence agencies' prewar judgments about Iraq. For weeks, however, a draft of testimony that he originally planned to deliver next month before the Senate intelligence committee has been circulating for review within the administration, and intelligence officials said they expected that it would form the core of his public remarks on Thursday.

"Among other things, I think he'll talk about the difficulties and complexities inherent in the intelligence business," one intelligence official said. "There are people who have leapt to the conclusion that the intelligence was all wrong, and they don't know what they are talking about."

Admirers of Mr. Tenet say it would be unfair for the intelligence chief to be held responsible for any lapses involving Iraq. In this view, any prewar misjudgments by intelligence agencies about Iraq reflect institutional shortcomings, not personal ones.

But critics including Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who formerly headed the Intelligence Committee, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser under President Carter, have said that someone should be held responsible for the misjudgments. In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Brzezinski said that he did not want to single out Mr. Tenet or anyone else. Still, he said, "I feel very strongly that you cannot have credibility if there's not accountability for a very serious failing, and I think the failure is a very serious one."

With inquiries on Iraq by the Senate panel and others still under way, Mr. Bush had initially resisted calls by members of Congress for an independent commission to look into Dr. Kay's comments about intelligence failures. The president reversed course last weekend but is not expected to name members to an investigating panel until Friday at the earliest, White House officials said Wednesday, to allow time for administration lawyers to vet nominees for possible conflicts of interest.

That effort was described as an attempt to avoid a repeat of the embarrassment felt at the White House when Henry A. Kissinger, whom Mr. Bush appointed as the first chairman of the commission looking into the Sept. 11 attacks, decided to step down rather than release a list of clients of his consulting firm.

posted by prof_booty | 10:51 AM