washingtonpost.com: Officials Defend Iraq Intelligence

Correction to This Article
In articles on June 9 and June 10, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was misquoted as saying "somebody may have known" that information about Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium in Africa was incorrect. Rice said that "somebody below may have known."

The Bush administration's two top foreign policy advisers yesterday said it was the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and that the president and others did not exaggerate the threat in the months before going to war.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice described as "revisionist history" recent criticism that senior Bush officials starting with the president may have overstated what was known about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons leading up to the war in March.

"The truth of the matter," Rice said on NBC's "Meet the Press," "is that repeated directors of central intelligence, repeated reports by intelligence agencies around the world, repeated reports by United Nations inspectors asking hard questions of Saddam Hussein, and tremendous efforts by this regime to conceal and hide what it was doing, clearly give a picture of a regime that had weapons of mass destruction and was determined to conceal them."

She said that Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and "the president gets his intelligence from his director of central intelligence." The key judgments of the intelligence community, Rice said on ABC's "This Week," were contained in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that said flatly that "Iraq had weapons of mass destruction" and that Hussein "was continuing to improve his weapons of mass destruction capabilities, that he was hiding these from the world, [and] that there were large, unaccounted-for stockpiles."

Although those judgments of the October report were unequivocal, the backup material in a declassified version of it made public Oct. 4 was less definitive. The backup material said that "accounting and current production capabilities strongly suggest that Iraq maintains a stockpile of chemical agents" and not that it possessed such a stockpile. It also said that Iraq "probably" had concealed items "necessary for continuing its CW [chemical warfare] effort" and was rebuilding dual-use equipment that "could" be diverted to weapons production, not that Baghdad was improving its capabilities.

Rice said Tenet, who had signed off on the October paper, "runs a disciplined process that takes into account the views of different intelligence agencies . . . [and] takes into account differences about this data point or that data point." During one appearance yesterday Rice allowed that it was the "preponderance of evidence" that led to the judgments and that "his programs were active and being reconstituted."

Rice did concede that an inaccurate claim, that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa, was included in President Bush's State of the Union message in January. Rice said the White House believed that to be true at the time. But she said the claim, attributed in the speech to the British, was what "the intelligence community said we could say."

When asked about New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's report in May that some intelligence officials were told in February 2002, almost a year before the president's speech, that the information on the uranium purchase was false, she replied, "Somebody may have known." But she added Iraq tried to buy more uranium and "the important thing . . . [was] the nuclear weapons program did not rest on a document that the British cited."

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, appearing on the morning talk shows yesterday, also defended the administration's prewar statements and particularly his own speech before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, as representing a "good, solid assessment" of Iraq's weapons programs. And, like Rice, Powell pointed to Tenet saying that Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction was "the official judgment of the director of central intelligence who is the one responsible for gathering all this information."

Rice and Powell said they believed the weapons would still turn up as the search in Iraq continues. "I'm sure more evidence and more proof will come forward as we go down the road," Powell said.

Rice said only "a fraction of the [Iraqi] people who were involved" in the weapons programs have been interviewed and "we've always known that the strongest evidence . . . will come from talking to the people who were involved."

Criticism, however, continued yesterday. Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, "There is too much evidence that intelligence was shaded." Levin, who also sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the possible or probable presence of prohibited weapons in Iraq "was turned into a certainty over and over and over again by the administration."

Levin added that if weapons are not found, "the credibility and reliability of our intelligence is going to be challenged in the future, and it's going to be much more difficult for us to lead the world."

The administration drew support from Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination and was a leader in the House when the vote was taken to go to war if necessary. Gephardt pointed out that President Bill Clinton and others in his administration had said during the 1990s that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Even Levin wrote a letter to Clinton in 1998 in which he said he had no doubt Hussein had such weapons. But yesterday Levin said the situation then was different because the U.N. inspectors were not in Iraq, while they were there in March. "We should not have cut those inspections short at that time," Levin said. "We should have allowed those inspections to continue."

In 1998, Clinton decided to tighten the policy of keeping Hussein in isolation by enforcing the "no-fly" zones that prevented him from moving against his neighbors and the Kurdish zones in northern Iraq.

Levin said he expected that Congress would investigate the Iraq intelligence, and Rice said Bush would welcome it. Republican leaders, Levin said, appeared to be resisting the word "investigation, so we'd be happy to call it an inquiry."

The chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), said that Tenet had agreed to provide "full documentation" of the intelligence material "in regards to Secretary Powell's comments, the president's comments and anybody else's comments."

Roberts also said he wondered what role may have been played by a small unit of analysts set up within the office of Douglas J. Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy. Their analysis of the Iraqi weapons program went to senior policymakers.

Roberts said he had no evidence that the intelligence was shaded, but he said he has concerns and wants the committee to "do our homework first."

Using a phrase that was associated with the failure to use intelligence correctly and predict the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Rice described putting together "hundreds and hundreds of dots about the Iraqi program" that led up to "a policy judgment that the president had to make that this was a serious enough threat that it was time to finally do something about this serial abuser of U.N. resolutions. And it is quite clear to me that he was right to do what he did."

Rice confirmed The Washington Post report last week that Vice President Cheney made numerous trips to the CIA, but said it was "simply not true" that it was done to pressure analysts to come around to the administration's viewpoint. "The director of central intelligence has said, and has assured all of us, that he has no evidence or any belief that anybody was pressured at any time to change estimates or to change their assessments," Rice said.