CIA condemned for flawed intelligence on Iraqi weapons

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
29 September 2003

The intelligence used by the CIA to conclude that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qa'ida has been severely criticised by leaders of a high-ranking Congressional committee as being "outdated, circumstantial, piecemeal and fragmentary". They said the agency's ability to gather fresh information had "significant deficiencies".

In a scathing attack on the information cited by President George Bush and his senior officials as they made their case for war, the leaders of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said the CIA had relied on "past assessments" that dated from 1998 when UN weapons inspectors left Iraq.

"The absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programmes had been destroyed was considered proof that they continued to exist," the committee leaders said in a letter to the CIA director, George Tenet.

Controversy over America's failure to find the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration insisted Iraq possessed has been growing since US and British forces ousted Saddam Hussein and occupied the country. And, this week, America's senior weapons inspector, David Kay, is expected to report that his team of 1,400 officials and special forces soldiers have still uncovered no evidence of WMD.

But the criticism by the leaders of the Republican-controlled intelligence committee will be of particular embarrassment to the Bush administration, given the sympathies of the chairman, Porter Goss. Mr Goss is a former CIA agent and a long-time supporter of the often beleaguered Mr Tenet. His letter to Mr Tenet containing the criticisms was also signed by the committee's senior Democrat.

The letter said: "Lack of specific intelligence in regime plans and intentions, WMD and Iraq's support to terrorist groups appears to have hampered the [intelligence community's] ability to provide a better assessment to policy-makers from 1998 [until] 2003."

The letter followed a review by the intelligence committee of 19 volumes of classified material used by the CIA when drawing up its secret 2002 national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Iraq. This was considered the most comprehensive assessment of Iraq's capability available to the Bush administration and was regularly cited as the case for war against Saddam was made.

The administration has been on the back foot as it becomes increasingly clear the discovery of any WMD in Iraq is extremely unlikely.

Yesterday, the President's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was the latest senior official to defend the intelligence used by Mr Bush. "The President believes he had very good intelligence going into the war," she said on a US television talk show. "There was enrichment of the intelligence from 1998 over the period leading up to the war. And nothing pointed to a reversal of Saddam Hussein's very active efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. It was very clear this continued and it was a gathering danger."

The CIA also defended its intelligence-gathering. In a statement, spokesman Bill Harlow, said: "In the post-1998 period, the intelligence community launched a sustained effort to enhance our unilateral understanding of Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction programmes. From all of our disciplines, important gains were made." Mr Harlow said the intelligence committee had "yet to take the time to fully evaluate how the NIE was constructed and why and on what specific basis judgements and findings were reached by our national intelligence officer and analysts".

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