Hmm, no good news here. Looks like the CIA already thought they didn't have any WMD.
I guess Tenet really did have a good reason to resign. That's news.
...and of course in about another three or four weeks they will find more "WMD" in Iraq or another country will come out and say they told us to invade...
Seems to be a pattern here....
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CIA failed to share doubts on Iraq arms
Program was dropped, scientists' relatives say
By James Risen
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
July 6, 2004
WASHINGTON ? The CIA was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the CIA failed to give that information to President Bush even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials.
The existence of a secret prewar CIA operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists ? and the agency's failure to give their statements to the president and other policy-makers ? has been uncovered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The panel has been investigating the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons and plans to release a report this week on the first phase of its inquiry. The report is expected to contain a scathing indictment of the CIA and its leaders for failing to recognize that the evidence they had collected did not justify their assessment that Hussein had illicit weapons.
CIA officials, saying that only a handful of relatives made claims that the weapons programs were dead, play down the significance of the information collected in the secret debriefing operation.
The Senate report, intelligence officials say, concludes that the agency and the rest of the intelligence community did a poor job of collecting information about the status of Iraq's weapons programs and that analysts at the CIA and other intelligence agencies did an even worse job of writing reports that accurately reflected the information they had.
Among the problems were instances in which analysts may have misrepresented information, writing reports that distorted evidence to bolster their case that Iraq did have chemical, biological and nuclear programs, according to government officials.
The Senate found, for example, that an Iraqi defector who supposedly provided evidence of the existence of a biological weapons program had actually said that he did not know of any such program.
In another case concerning whether a shipment of aluminum tubes seized on its way to Iraq was evidence that Baghdad was trying to build a nuclear bomb, the Senate panel raised questions about whether the CIA had become an advocate, rather than an objective observer, and selectively sought to prove that the tubes were for a nuclear weapons program.
While the Senate panel has concluded that CIA analysts and other intelligence officials overstated the case that Iraq had illicit weapons, the committee has not found any evidence that the analysts changed their reports as a result of political pressure from the White House, according to officials familiar with the report.
The Senate report is expected to criticize the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and his deputy, John McLaughlin, and other senior CIA officials for the way they managed the agency before the war.
Tenet has announced his resignation, effective July 11, and McLaughlin will serve as acting director until a permanent director is appointed.
The possibility that Tenet personally overstated the evidence has been investigated by the Senate panel, officials said. He was interviewed privately by the panel recently and was asked whether he told Bush that the case for the existence of Iraq's unconventional weapons was a "slam dunk."
In his book "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward reported that Tenet reassured Bush about the evidence of the existence of Iraq's illicit weapons after Bush had made clear he was unimpressed by the evidence presented to him in a December 2002 briefing by McLaughlin. "It's a slam-dunk case!" Tenet is quoted as telling the president.
In his private interview with the Senate panel, Tenet refused to say whether he had used the "slam-dunk" phrase, arguing that his conversations with the president were privileged, officials said.
In hindsight, the Senate panel and many other intelligence officials now agree that there was little effort within the U.S. intelligence community before the war to question the basic assumption that Hussein was still seeking to produce illicit weapons.
Yet, there were some people inside the intelligence community who recognized the need for better evidence, according to intelligence officials.
In 1998, the United Nations withdrew its weapons inspectors from Iraq, severely hampering the CIA's ability to monitor Iraqi weapons efforts. In response, Charlie Allen, the agency's assistant director for collection, began searching for new sources of information, the intelligence officials said.
He pushed for several new collection programs, including one that called for approaching members of the families of Iraqi scientists believed to be involved in secret weapons programs, the officials said. At the time, the CIA had no direct access to important Iraqi scientists, and using family members as intermediaries seemed like the next best thing.
Beginning in 2000, the CIA contacted the relatives and asked them what they knew or could learn about the scientific work being conducted by other relatives. Officials would not say how or where the relatives were contacted.
The relatives told the agency that the scientists had said that they were no longer working on illicit weapons and that those programs were dead. Yet, the statements from the relatives were never included in CIA intelligence reports on Iraq that were distributed throughout the government.
CIA analysts monitoring Iraq apparently ignored the statements from the family members and continued to issue assessments that Hussein was still developing unconventional weapons, Senate investigators have found.
At the time, CIA analysts were deeply cynical about statements from Iraqis suggesting that Hussein had no illicit weapons, and they assumed that such talk was part of an Iraqi denial and deception program, several intelligence officials said.
"No useful information was collected from the family members, and that's why it wouldn't have been disseminated," a CIA spokesman said.
The agency's handling of intelligence on biological weapons has also drawn congressional criticism. In fact, the CIA relied heavily on four Iraqi defectors to reach its conclusion that Iraq had developed mobile biological weapons laboratories.
But one defector, an Iraqi scientist, said his work was unrelated to biological weapons. He said he did not know of any other biological weapons activity under way in Iraq. Senate investigators did not discover that his statements contradicted the view that Iraq had an active biological program until they read the original reports of his debriefings from before the war, officials said.
A CIA official said the agency still had good reasons to use the defectors' information and has been trying to explain that to the Senate committee. The official would not elaborate.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040706/news_1n6weapons.html
Topic: Of Interest to WMD Die Hards... (Read 1069 times)