Powell's doubts over CIA intelligence

[MrDave]

Powell's doubts over CIA intelligence on Iraq prompted him to set up secret review

Specialists removed questionable evidence about weapons from draft of secretary of state's speech to UN

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday June 2, 2003
The Guardian

Fresh evidence emerged last night that Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was so disturbed about questionable American intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that he assembled a secret team to review the information he was given before he made a crucial speech to the UN security council on February 5.
Mr Powell conducted a full-dress rehearsal of the speech on the eve of the session at his suite in the Waldorf Astoria, his New York base when he is on UN business, according to the authoritative US News and World Report.

Much of the initial information for Mr Powell's speech to the UN was provided by the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, set up a special unit, the Office of Special Plans, to counter the uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.

Mr Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, US News and World Report says today. At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.

Presented with a script for his speech, Mr Powell suspected that Washington hawks were "cherry picking", the US magazine Newsweek also reports today. Greg Theilmann, a recently retired state department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, says that inside the Bush administration "there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused".

The Bush administration, under increased scrutiny for failing to find Saddam Hussein's arsenals eight weeks after occupying Baghdad, yesterday confronted the damaging new allegations on the misuse of intelligence to bolster the case for war.

The gaps in the case against Saddam have become a matter for public debate only within the last few days. They have also become an issue of credibility for the CIA and the Bush administration as it begins to assemble a case against Iran and its nuclear programme.

Yesterday, a senior Bush administration official told reporters travelling with the president to the Evian summit that Washington was not alone in its pursuit of Saddam's arsenal.

"We have to remember that there's a long history of accusation of the weapons of mass destruction programmes in Iraq. A lot of what is unresolved about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programme comes from the United Nations, from Unscom, from Unmovic [teams of weapons inspectors] and, of course, from US and other intelligence," the official said.

The official also said that US forces in Iraq had not yet had the time to process the hundreds of documents captured since Saddam's fall, or track down the people with information on his weapons programmes.

On Friday, the CIA director, George Tenet, was forced to issue a statement denying the agency doctored intelligence reports.

"Our role is to call it like we see it, to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and what we base it on. That's the code we live by," the statement said.

During a series of meetings at CIA headquarters last February, initiated by Mr Powell, the secretary of state was reported to have reviewed the intelligence reports on Saddam, his arsenal of chemical and nuclear weapons, and his possible links with al-Qaida. The ostensible purpose of the exercise, carried out over four days, was to decide which should be included in his address.

However, a common theme of the meetings was the failure of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to produce a convincing case against Saddam. Despite the increasingly belligerent statements from the administration's hawks, the CIA had disturbingly little proof.

Even more damaging, many of the assertions bandied about were based on reports that were speculative or impossible to corroborate - but seized on because they suited the agenda of the hawks in the administration. Ambiguities and nuance were left aside.

One claim from the original dossier that could not be proved involved the supply of sensitive software from Australia that would have allowed Baghdad to gather sensitive information about the topography of the US. However, the CIA could not establish for Mr Powell whether the software had been delivered to Iraq.

Although the issue of flawed CIA intelligence has caused concern about the agency's ability to gather evidence on potential threats to the US, it did not appear to have shaken the widespread belief that the war on Iraq was a just war.

"The day that I saw those nine and 10-year-old boys released from a prison, the day I saw the mass graves uncovered, it was ample testimony of the brutality and repressiveness of this regime," the Republican senator John McCain told ABC television yesterday. "It was the day that I believe our liberation of Iraq was fully vindicated."

The president's changing tune

'The Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons, and to stop all support for terrorist groups. The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations'
October 7 2002

'Year after year, Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction'
January 28 2003

'The regime of Saddam Hussein spent years hiding and disguising his weapons... it's going to take time to find them. But we know he had them. And whether he destroyed them, moved them, or hid them, we're going to find out the truth'
April 24 2003

'One thing we know is that he had a weapons programme. We also know he spent years trying to hide the weapons programme. And over time the truth will come out'
May 6 2003

'We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories... And we'll find more. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them.'
May 29 2003

Katy Heslop

[tncorgi]

Analysis of Iraqi Weapons 'Wrong'
The predicted use of banned agents did not occur, a Marine commander says. The CIA chief defends his staff's assessments.
By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-wmd31may31,1,6472252.story?coll=la%2Dhome%2Dheadlines

May 31, 2003

WASHINGTON — The top Marine commander in Iraq said Friday that U.S. intelligence was "simply wrong" in its assessment that Saddam Hussein intended to unleash chemical or biological weapons against U.S. forces during the war, but he stopped short of saying there was an overall intelligence failure.

Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, also said he had fully expected U.S. forces to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction after the war ended.

"It was a surprise to me then, it remains a surprise to me now, that we have not uncovered weapons," Conway said from Baghdad in a teleconference call with reporters in Washington.

"It's not for lack of trying," he said. "We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there."

The subject of the search for banned weapons is becoming an increasingly uncomfortable one for the Bush administration, with several influential lawmakers this week saying they believe the White House hyped the Iraq threat or was misled by the intelligence community. Other critics have alleged that the Pentagon pressured the intelligence community to skew its analyses.

Amid the mounting criticism, CIA Director George J. Tenet took the unusual step of issuing a statement Friday denying that the agency's assessments on Iraq were politicized.

"Our role is to call it like we see it — to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and what we base it on," Tenet said. "That is exactly what was done and continues to be done on intelligence issues related to Iraq."

He added that he was proud of the work done by the agency's analysts, saying, "The integrity of our process was maintained throughout."

Conway, the Marine commander, acknowledged that "intelligence failure" is "too strong a word to use at this point." But he said: "What the regime was intending to do in terms of its use of the weapons, we thought we understood — or we certainly had our best guess, our most dangerous, our most likely courses of action that the intelligence folks were giving us. We were simply wrong.

"But whether or not we're wrong at the national level, I think, still very much remains to be seen."

Conway, who said he still believes it is possible that weapons of mass destruction will be found, spoke as the Pentagon disclosed details of its plans to send a new team of more than 1,000 experts to search for evidence of banned weapons. Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency's human intelligence service, will lead the effort.

In a separate news briefing Friday, Dayton suggested that it is possible that Iraq deliberately misled U.S. intelligence agencies, making them think that weapons were being produced and deployed even as they were secretly being destroyed.

"We may find out three months from now that there was an elaborate deception program and the stuff was destroyed," Dayton said. Asked whether he believes the new search teams would uncover evidence of illicit munitions, Dayton offered a cautious reply.

"Do I think we're going to find something? Yeah, I kind of do," he said, adding that he still believes Washington's sources of intelligence on Iraq before the war were credible.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who was largely responsible for arguing the administration's case for the war on Iraq to a skeptical international community, told reporters Friday that all of the evidence he presented at a prewar U.N. Security Council meeting was solid.

"Everything I presented on the 5th of February, I can tell you, there was good sourcing for, was not politicized. It was solid information," Powell said. "Let people look into it, let people examine it."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld also defended the administration's actions in the months before the Iraq campaign, saying in a radio interview Thursday, "This war was not waged under any false pretext."

And Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, sought to minimize the importance of weapons of mass destruction in the administration's calculus for war.

"For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Wolfowitz said in comments released Wednesday.

Even as senior administration officials sought to deflect criticism, the issue appeared to gain momentum in Washington.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said she and others based their votes for supporting the war in Iraq on White House claims that Baghdad posed a direct and growing threat to the United States.

"If it turns out that the intelligence was flawed, that will undercut the administration's credibility in making its case for this war and any future war," Harman said. Were the White House to press for confronting Iran or another country now, she said, "there would be a clamor against it until these questions [on Iraq] are answered."

Harman stressed that she believes that Iraq possessed banned weapons in the 1990s but may have destroyed or moved them before the war. She and Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to Tenet recently asking for a report by July 1 reconciling prewar intelligence with what has been found on the ground in Iraq.

The CIA has already launched an extensive review of its intelligence. The post-mortem, reported in The Times on April 19, was planned before the war and is described by agency officials as a "lessons learned" exercise.

The agency is also coming under some criticism from former analysts. A group of retirees, calling itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, recently sent a letter to the White House calling the assessments on Iraq an "intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions." The letter was first reported in Friday's New York Times.

A U.S. intelligence official brushed aside the criticism, saying that most of the members of the group "left the agency years ago and they simply are not in a position to comment knowledgeably on current analytic work." The group could not be reached for comment.

Pentagon officials said Friday that U.S. teams had visited about 300 of the more than 900 suspected weapons sites identified before the war. So far, no chemical or biological agents, or even precursor materials, have been recovered.

The U.S. seized two vehicles in northern Iraq last month that the CIA believes were mobile biological weapons production facilities, although officials acknowledge there is no evidence the trailers were ever used to produce any illegal agents.

On Friday, President Bush told a reporter for Polish television that the trailers were evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

"We found biological laboratories They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on," said the president, who flew Friday to Poland, the first leg of a several-nation tour. "But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."

The Pentagon is in the midst of a major overhaul of its weapons hunt. Dayton said there will be a "decreased emphasis on fixed sites" and a greater focus on combing captured documents and questioning Iraqis for information on weapons programs.

"We're not going to mechanically go down the list and check off locations," he said. He could not say how many of the remaining, unvisited sites had been secured by U.S. forces.

Dayton is scheduled to leave Monday for Baghdad to lead what is being called the Iraq Survey Group, a team of experts, analysts and other workers taking over the mission from existing Army units.

Only 200 to 300 members will be actively involved in the search for banned weapons on a day-to-day basis, Dayton said, a slight increase over the size of existing search teams. The group's job will also include looking for evidence of links between Hussein and Al Qaeda — another allegation the administration has so far been unable to prove — as well as collecting evidence of war crimes.

Stephen A. Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said it has not been decided whether U.N. teams will be invited to participate in the search for chemical or biological arms, although he suggested it was possible.

Cambone also insisted that he remains convinced that prewar intelligence suggesting the presence of illicit arms was accurate.

"I do not believe the administration is backing away from that position," he said. "Nothing that has happened over the last month has changed my view or, as far as I know, the view of others on the subject."

Earlier in the day, the Marines' Conway had discussed in some detail theater commanders' expectations that they would probably encounter chemical weapons as they pushed rapidly toward Baghdad. The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was responsible for a main thrust of the campaign along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.

Conway said U.S. commanders had anticipated four "triggers" that would prompt Iraq to fire chemical weapons, including crossings of the two rivers.

"There were times where everybody was sleeping with their boots on and with their gas masks pretty close," he said. "We truly thought that [chemical weapons] were distributed" among Iraqi units.