csua.org/u/822 -> www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/politics/06INTE.html?ei=5062&en=313ade4c60ca9e37&ex=1089691200&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=
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 policymakers 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 wide-ranging 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 Mr 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. That operation is one of a number of significant disclosures by the Senate investigation. 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. The Senate found, for example, that an Iraqi defector who supposedly provided evidence of the existence of a biological weapons program had actually said 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 both the director of central intelligence, George J Tenet, and his deputy, John McLaughlin, and other senior CIA officials, for the way they managed the agency before the war. Mr Tenet has announced his resignation, effective July 11, and Mr McLaughlin will serve as acting director until a permanent director is appointed. The CIA has scheduled a farewell ceremony for Mr Tenet on Thursday, just as the reverberations from the Senate report are likely to be hitting the agency. The possibility that Mr 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 President Bush that the case for the existence of Iraq's unconventional weapons was a "slam dunk." In his book about the Bush administration's planning for the war in Iraq, "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward reported that Mr Tenet reassured Mr Bush about the evidence of the existence of Iraq's illicit weapons after Mr Bush had made clear he was unimpressed by the evidence presented to him in a December 2002 briefing by Mr McLaughlin. In his private interview with the Senate panel, Mr 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 American intelligence community before the war to question the basic assumption that Mr Hussein was still seeking to produce illicit weapons. evidence to the contrary was ignored or seen as part of a clever Iraqi disinformation campaign. Yet there were some people inside the intelligence community who recognized the need for better evidence, according to intelligence officials. 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 work being conducted by the scientists. 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 Mr Hussein was still developing unconventional weapons, Senate investigators have found. At the time, CIA analysts were deeply cynical about statements from Iraqis suggesting that Mr Hussein had no illicit weapons, and assumed that such talk was simply part of an Iraqi denial and deception program, several intelligence officials said. In response, a CIA spokesman said, the families' statements were "not at all convincing." "There was nothing definitive about it," the spokesman said. "No useful information was collected from the family members, and that's why it wouldn't have been disseminated." 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 he had been working on a technical program known as a "protein slurry," and that 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 defector's information, and has been trying to explain that to the Senate committee. There were problems with the handling of the other defectors used to buttress the biological weapons case. Information from one was used even though the Defense Intelligence Agency had warned in the spring of 2002 that he had fabricated information. The CIA took statements that another defector had given to German intelligence without knowing his identity or learning that he had ties to the Iraqi National Congress, the Iraqi exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi. Mr Chalabi, until recently a close ally of the Pentagon, fell into disfavor with the Bush administration after it became clear that his organization had provided disinformation to the United States and had exaggerated the threat posed by Mr Hussein. Senior CIA analysts became convinced that the shipment was strong evidence that Mr Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program. The agency concluded that the aluminum tubes were to be used as spinning rotors in a centrifuge that could enrich uranium for bombs. But other government experts, particularly at the national laboratories and in the State Department, were skeptical. They argued that the tubes seemed designed for use in conventional military rockets. The technical debate reached a peak in 2002, just as the intelligence community was preparing a comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate, an interagency assessment of the status of Iraq's unconventional weapons. Seeking to p...
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