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Big guns fired in intelligence
war
By Andrew Tully
WASHINGTON - For the second straight day, the
administration of United States President George W Bush
had a senior official make a public defense of the
intelligence that was used to justify the invasion of
Iraq last March.
On Thursday, George Tenet, the
director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) , said
in a Washington speech it was too early to state
unequivocally that weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
will not be found in Iraq. The same point was made on
Wednesday by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in
testimony before Congress.
The two men were
countering statements made by David Kay, the former
United Nations weapons inspector personally chosen by
Tenet to search for WMD in Iraq on behalf of the CIA.
Two weeks ago, Kay resigned the position and returned to
Washington, where he has repeatedly stated that no such
weapons likely will be found. He said the intelligence
of the US, the UN and others evidently was wrong in
indicating that Iraq's president at the time, Saddam
Hussein, had the weapons.
As war approached a
year ago, Bush repeatedly cited Saddam's suspected
weapons as a reason for an invasion, despite reluctance
from key members of the UN Security Council, including
long-standing US allies.
In Thursday's speech at
Georgetown University in Washington, Tenet said that CIA
analysts never portrayed Saddam as an imminent threat to
the region, the world or the US in particular. And he
directly countered some critics' assertions that
administration policymakers influenced his agency in how
it interpreted its intelligence.
"They [CIA
analysts] never said there was an imminent threat.
Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our
policymakers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his
efforts to deceive and build programs that might
constantly surprise us and threaten our interests. No
one told us what to say or how to say it," Tenet said.
Tenet said that his analysts differed on some
aspects of Iraq's weapons capabilities, and that those
differences were included in the CIA's intelligence
summary given to the White House five months before the
war began.
However, the CIA director did not
portray his agency's results as full. "The question
being asked about Iraq, in the starkest terms, is, 'Were
we right or were we wrong'? In the intelligence
business, you are almost never completely wrong or
completely right. That applies, in full, to the question
of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction," Tenet said.
In a further response to Kay's recent
statements, Tenet reminded his audience that despite
Kay's resignation from the Iraq Survey Group, the
American inspectors were still looking for weapons. "As
we meet here today, the Iraq Survey Group is continuing
its important search for people and data and, despite
some public statements, we are nowhere near 85 percent
finished," Tenet said.
On Wednesday, Rumsfeld
told the Senate Armed Services Committee that US
intelligence has had what he called "some wonderful
successes" that have not been made public. He said it
was only the failures that become public. Under tough
questioning from some senators, Rumsfeld insisted that
American inspectors may still find banned weapons in
Iraq.
The failure so far to find the weapons has
become problematic for Bush as he faces re-election in
November. Opposition Democrats say that his
administration compounded the suspected intelligence
failures by interpreting them in a way that would ensure
war.
Bush has approved the idea of naming a
bipartisan commission to investigate pre-war
intelligence, and is expected to announce its formation
soon. Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee is
conducting its own examination of that intelligence.
Doubts cloud Powell's historic UN
address
Robert McMahon reports for Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty that one year ago, US Secretary of
State Colin Powell made an extraordinary presentation to
his counterparts on the UN Security Council. He unveiled
classified intelligence material, using a sound and
video display, to try to prove that Saddam was
maintaining a program of WMD in defiance of
international demands. But in the absence of any major
weapons discoveries since then, both the US and British
governments are now mounting investigations into
intelligence failures.
In the end, Powell's
special appearance at the Security Council last year did
not shift the balance in favor of military action in
Iraq. France, Russia and Germany continued to press for
further weapons inspections. The US and Britain
abandoned efforts to seek an explicit Security Council
mandate for toppling Saddam and launched a war the
following month.
But Powell's February 5 address
- considered the best case Washington could make to go
to war - is now part of the puzzling post-mortem on
suspected US intelligence failures.
Powell and
other coalition leaders this week continued to defend
the war, saying that Saddam's past actions and his
intentions were clear. But critics say the
administration will have to work hard to regain trust in
its intelligence on security matters.
From the
outset of his address last year, Powell asserted that
the US had considerable evidence of Iraqi misdeeds:
"What you will see is an accumulation of facts and
disturbing behavior. The facts and Iraq's behavior
demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and his regime have made
no effort - no effort - to disarm as required by the
international community. Indeed, the facts and Iraq's
behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are
concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass
destruction."
Powell went on to point to
developments in Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and
ballistic missiles programs. He said that Iraq had
stockpiled enough chemical weapons agent to fill 16,000
battlefield rockets. Iraq had the capability to produce
biological weapons, Powell said, with the ability to
cause "massive death and destruction".
Iraq was
also trying to acquire aluminum tubes, which Powell said
were likely intended for use in centrifuges to enrich
uranium. That would provide a way to make fissile
material needed to manufacture a bomb.
But since
Powell's report, US-led teams have uncovered no major
evidence of stockpiles of chemical and biological
weapons. Unmanned airborne vehicles, which Powell warned
could be used to spray biological agents, have been
found to be unequipped to spread toxins. The
International Atomic Energy Agency has discounted the
aluminum tubes and found Iraq did not have a viable
nuclear program.
One area validated was Powell's
charge that Iraq was seeking to build missiles capable
of reaching beyond the 150 kilometer limit set by the
UN. UN inspectors discovered missiles that exceeded the
limit and were destroying them shortly before the war
began last March.
But much of Powell's speech
can now be dismissed, says Joseph Cirincione, director
of the Non-proliferation Project at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. A study last month by
the Carnegie Endowment concluded that Iraq was not an
immediate threat to the US or the Middle East and that
the Bush administration had "systematically
misrepresented" the danger from Baghdad.
"It's
difficult to find a sentence [of Powell's report] that
is actually accurate at this point," he said. "The
secretary raises some 29 major allegations about the
programs. As far as we know, none of those has been
verified, and many of those are now almost certainly not
true." Cirincione says that it is vital for senior Bush
administration officials to correct the statements they
made about Iraq to re-establish some credibility.
Powell told The Washington Post this week that
he did not know whether he would have recommended an
invasion of Iraq had he been told there was no evidence
of stockpiles of banned weapons there. But he said the
US still did the right thing in toppling Saddam. And
both the US and Britain have announced plans to
investigate Iraqi intelligence failures.
A
former Canadian diplomat at the UN, David Malone, says
that Powell's international stature has suffered in the
year since his report. Malone, who heads the
International Peace Academy, tells RFE/RL that
Washington's foreign policy community must seek to avoid
such apparent intelligence letdowns in the future.
"Intelligence remains important to key
governments," he said. "The critical question mark over
intelligence is whether it can remain uncontaminated by
political agendas, which clearly over the past two years
on the question of Iraq have had much more importance
than they should have had."
What complicated the
case of Iraq was Saddam's unwillingness to fully divulge
information on his weapons program, although his regime
repeatedly said it had disarmed. Throughout the prewar
debate, chief UN monitor Hans Blix, who favored a
continuation of inspections, often referred to Iraq's
refusal to account for missing stocks of chemical and
biological weapons.
The UN maintained an ominous
list of unresolved biological and chemical-weapons
issues, dating back to the end of the first Gulf War in
1991. Spokesman Ewen Buchanan of the UN Monitoring,
Inspection, and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC) noted
the problem in an interview with RFE/RL.
"We had
been unable to account for everything which Iraq had
admitted to having had in the past," he said. "By way of
example, Iraq produced - by their own account - 8.5 tons
of the biological weapon agent anthrax. They claimed
they had destroyed this secretly in the summer of 1991,
but the problem for us was how to verify whether that
was true. They claimed to have poured it out on the
ground years and years ago, but it was impossible for us
to determine how much anthrax was there in the ground."
For some states, Saddam's pattern of
non-compliance persuaded them that the tough US approach
was the right one. Following Powell's presentation last
year, a group known as the Vilnius 10 issued a joint
statement at the UN, saying its members were prepared to
contribute to an international coalition in Iraq if it
failed to comply with inspections.
The group
comprised former communist states poised to become North
Atlantic Treaty Organization candidates. They included
Bulgaria, one of only four countries on the Security
Council to openly side with Washington.
Romanian
Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana, whose country also
signed the statement, maintains that ousting Saddam was
the right approach, regardless of the debate over WMD.
He told a news conference earlier this week in New York
that Romanians saw the overthrow of Saddam as a moral
issue: "In Romania, the discussion about weapons of mass
destruction was a secondary debate to the democracy
debate. Of course, this was not the main topic of last
year's discussion, including in the UN with the
presentation of intelligence and whatever they
presented. But for us, it was more of a moral democracy
case than a weapons of mass destruction case."
Romania has contributed more than 800 soldiers
to the coalition force in Iraq. Last month it replaced
Bulgaria on the Security Council and will preside over
the Security Council just after the scheduled handover
of power to Iraqi authorities on July 1.
The
Security Council this year is also due to debate the
future of UNMOVIC. One suggestion favored by some
members is to transform the agency into a permanent
inspection corps at the UN to monitor chemical,
biological and ballistic missile programs.
(RFE/RL's Yuri Zhigalkin contributed
to this report.)
Copyright (c) 2004,
RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut
Ave NW, Washington DC 20036
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