Friday, October 25, 2002
Iraq intelligence incites feud
Mercury News - San Jose, CA
Fri, Oct. 25, 2002
Iraq intelligence incites feud
CIA PROTESTS PENTAGON UNIT'S ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENTS
By Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay
Mercury News Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon and the CIA are waging a bitter feud over secret intelligence that is being used to shape U.S. policy toward Iraq, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The dispute has been fueled by the creation within the Pentagon of a special unit that provides senior policymakers with alternate assessments of Iraq intelligence.
Administration hawks who have been leading proponents of invading Iraq oversee the Pentagon unit, which is producing its own analyses of raw intelligence reports obtained from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other agencies, the officials said.
The dispute pits hard-liners long distrustful of the U.S. intelligence community against professional military and intelligence officers who fear that the hawks are shaping intelligence analyses to support their case for invading Iraq.
A major source on contention is the Pentagon's heavy reliance on data supplied by the Iraqi National Congress. The INC, the largest group within the divided Iraqi opposition, has a mixed reputation in Washington and a huge stake in whether President Bush makes good on his threat to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein by force. Its leader, Ahmed Chalabi, sees himself as a potential successor.
At issue in the battle are the most basic questions behind Bush's threatened invasion.
They include whether Iraq is linked to the Al-Qaida terrorist network; whether Iraqi troops would fight or surrender; and under what conditions Saddam would use chemical and biological weapons.
The feud also reveals longstanding divisions over U.S. intelligence capabilities.
Top Pentagon officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, have long been critical of the CIA. They and their allies have participated in previous so-called ``B Team'' exercises to counter what they see as the spy agency's overly cautious views.
For their part, career intelligence officials accuse the Pentagon group of politicizing an intelligence process that is supposed to be unbiased and non-partisan.
``The entire intelligence community hates this,'' said one former intelligence official who, like most others interviewed, requested anonymity.
It is not clear whether the Pentagon solicits the views of the U.S. intelligence community on the material it collects directly from the Iraqi opposition.
A senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed grave fears that civilian officials in the Pentagon may be blindly accepting assertions by Chalabi and his aides that a U.S. invasion would trigger mass defections of Iraqi troops and a quick collapse of Iraqi resistance.
``Our guys working this area for a living all believe Chalabi and all those guys in their Bond Street suits are charlatans. To take them for a source of anything except a fantasy trip would be a real stretch,'' one official said. ``But it's an article of faith among those with no military experience that the Iraqi military is low-hanging fruit.''
An INC representative did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment.
Rumsfeld on Thursday defended the unit's creation as a way for Pentagon policymakers to familiarize themselves with information on which CIA assessments on Iraq are made.
``People are doing that all over town. They do it at the State Department. They do it in my office. I do it,'' he said. ``I take this information and read it and think about it and sort and ask questions and talk to other people about it.
``Any suggestion that it is an intelligence-gathering activity or an intelligence unit of some sort, I think, would be a misunderstanding of it.''
Rumsfeld insisted that relations between the Pentagon and the CIA and between himself and CIA Director George Tenet are excellent.
Others disputed that.
The biggest, and to critics most troubling, divide is over the involvement of the INC.
INC officials predict that Saddam's regular army, as well as the Iraqi Republican Guard, will not fight U.S. troops. Only specialized units personally devoted to Saddam, including the Special Security Organization and the Special Republican Guard, will put up resistance, they say.
If true, that would allow U.S. troops to take Baghdad and the rest of the country without the kind of massive military force used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. If wrong, U.S. troops could face a much fiercer fight, possibly one they are not prepared for.
Fri, Oct. 25, 2002
Iraq intelligence incites feud
CIA PROTESTS PENTAGON UNIT'S ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENTS
By Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay
Mercury News Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon and the CIA are waging a bitter feud over secret intelligence that is being used to shape U.S. policy toward Iraq, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The dispute has been fueled by the creation within the Pentagon of a special unit that provides senior policymakers with alternate assessments of Iraq intelligence.
Administration hawks who have been leading proponents of invading Iraq oversee the Pentagon unit, which is producing its own analyses of raw intelligence reports obtained from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other agencies, the officials said.
The dispute pits hard-liners long distrustful of the U.S. intelligence community against professional military and intelligence officers who fear that the hawks are shaping intelligence analyses to support their case for invading Iraq.
A major source on contention is the Pentagon's heavy reliance on data supplied by the Iraqi National Congress. The INC, the largest group within the divided Iraqi opposition, has a mixed reputation in Washington and a huge stake in whether President Bush makes good on his threat to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein by force. Its leader, Ahmed Chalabi, sees himself as a potential successor.
At issue in the battle are the most basic questions behind Bush's threatened invasion.
They include whether Iraq is linked to the Al-Qaida terrorist network; whether Iraqi troops would fight or surrender; and under what conditions Saddam would use chemical and biological weapons.
The feud also reveals longstanding divisions over U.S. intelligence capabilities.
Top Pentagon officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, have long been critical of the CIA. They and their allies have participated in previous so-called ``B Team'' exercises to counter what they see as the spy agency's overly cautious views.
For their part, career intelligence officials accuse the Pentagon group of politicizing an intelligence process that is supposed to be unbiased and non-partisan.
``The entire intelligence community hates this,'' said one former intelligence official who, like most others interviewed, requested anonymity.
It is not clear whether the Pentagon solicits the views of the U.S. intelligence community on the material it collects directly from the Iraqi opposition.
A senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed grave fears that civilian officials in the Pentagon may be blindly accepting assertions by Chalabi and his aides that a U.S. invasion would trigger mass defections of Iraqi troops and a quick collapse of Iraqi resistance.
``Our guys working this area for a living all believe Chalabi and all those guys in their Bond Street suits are charlatans. To take them for a source of anything except a fantasy trip would be a real stretch,'' one official said. ``But it's an article of faith among those with no military experience that the Iraqi military is low-hanging fruit.''
An INC representative did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment.
Rumsfeld on Thursday defended the unit's creation as a way for Pentagon policymakers to familiarize themselves with information on which CIA assessments on Iraq are made.
``People are doing that all over town. They do it at the State Department. They do it in my office. I do it,'' he said. ``I take this information and read it and think about it and sort and ask questions and talk to other people about it.
``Any suggestion that it is an intelligence-gathering activity or an intelligence unit of some sort, I think, would be a misunderstanding of it.''
Rumsfeld insisted that relations between the Pentagon and the CIA and between himself and CIA Director George Tenet are excellent.
Others disputed that.
The biggest, and to critics most troubling, divide is over the involvement of the INC.
INC officials predict that Saddam's regular army, as well as the Iraqi Republican Guard, will not fight U.S. troops. Only specialized units personally devoted to Saddam, including the Special Security Organization and the Special Republican Guard, will put up resistance, they say.
If true, that would allow U.S. troops to take Baghdad and the rest of the country without the kind of massive military force used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. If wrong, U.S. troops could face a much fiercer fight, possibly one they are not prepared for.
Thursday, October 24, 2002
Maintain CIA's independence
USAToday
Maintain CIA's independence
by James Bamford
Oct 24, 2002
As the White House searches for every possible excuse to go to war with Iraq, pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda. In this case, the agencies are being pressed to find a casus belli for war, whether or not one exists.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements, and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," Vince Cannistraro, the agency's former head of counterterrorism, told The Guardian, a London newspaper.
This confirms what Knight-Ridder reporters found: "A growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war," the news service reported recently. "They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary."
In the case of Iraq, the consequence of a serious manipulation of the truth could be the loss of thousands of American lives. Fortunately, CIA Director George Tenet has apparently managed to keep the CIA on the straight and narrow during the debate over Iraq.
Although close to President Bush, Tenet has, nevertheless, maintained a degree of independence. One example is the letter he recently sent to the House-Senate committee looking into the 9/11 attacks. In it, the CIA argued that it is unlikely Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would initiate a chemical or biological attack against the USA, unless he is first provoked by an American military strike.
Not exactly the message the White House was trying to send.
When asked earlier by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., what intelligence he had that necessitated a quick vote on whether to go to war, Tenet answered honestly. "He didn't have anything new," Byrd said later.
Some in Congress worry about the schizophrenic view of Iraq they hear described by members of the administration. On the one hand, there are the breathless public pronouncements by the White House that Iraq appears on the verge of attacking the United States with horrendous weapons of mass destruction. But in secret sessions, the CIA apparently expresses the opposite view — that Iraq, while worrisome, is largely contained and poses no direct or immediate threat to the country.
"It's troubling to have classified information that contradicts statements made by the administration," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. "There's more they should share with the public."
Among the examples of the administration's less-than-forthright pronouncements:
In his Oct. 7 address to the nation, Bush warned of Iraq's attempts to import hardened aluminum tubes "for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." But David Albright, a physicist and former United Nations weapons inspector, told The Guardian that it was far from clear that the tubes were intended for such a purpose. He also said skeptics at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had been ordered to keep their doubts to themselves.
In his latest attempt to link Iraq and al-Qaeda, Bush referred to a "very senior al-Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." But the administration has given no indication that Abu Musab Zarqawi collaborated with senior Iraqi officials.
Bush also charged that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases." Former CIA officer Robert Baer, who spent years following al-Qaeda, told The Guardian that there were contacts between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqi government in Sudan in the early 1990s and in 1998. "But," he added, "there is no evidence that a strategic partnership came out of it. I'm unaware of any evidence of Saddam pursuing terrorism against the United States."
Bush mentioned for the first time that the Iraqi regime was developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — drones — that "could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas." He warned, "We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States." But these have a maximum range of only a few hundred miles and in no way could be flown halfway around the world.
Bush cautioned that if Saddam managed to acquire radioactive material no bigger than "a softball," he could build a nuclear weapon. Even if that were true, he has no way to deliver a nuclear warhead to the United States. His ability to build sophisticated, skyscraper-size intercontinental ballistic missiles, along with launch platforms and control facilities, is at least decades away.
The ability of Congress to receive independent, unbiased intelligence is essential. But that may soon be put in jeopardy. The administration is pushing a plan that would largely shift control of the intelligence community from the director of Central Intelligence to a new Pentagon intelligence czar.
Although about 85% of the intelligence community already comes under the Pentagon's umbrella, the CIA director still largely maintains control of the final estimates and analysis. Creating a powerful new intelligence czar under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could shift this delicate balance away from the more independent-minded Tenet and increase the chances that intelligence estimates might be "cooked" in favor of the Pentagon.
As Bush's "strike first, ask questions later" doctrine continues, with the prospect of endless wars and endless terrorism in retaliation, the need for honest intelligence reports becomes paramount. But if the Pentagon runs the spy world, the public and Congress will be reduced to a modern-day Diogenes, forever searching for that one honest report.
Maintain CIA's independence
by James Bamford
Oct 24, 2002
As the White House searches for every possible excuse to go to war with Iraq, pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda. In this case, the agencies are being pressed to find a casus belli for war, whether or not one exists.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements, and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," Vince Cannistraro, the agency's former head of counterterrorism, told The Guardian, a London newspaper.
This confirms what Knight-Ridder reporters found: "A growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war," the news service reported recently. "They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary."
In the case of Iraq, the consequence of a serious manipulation of the truth could be the loss of thousands of American lives. Fortunately, CIA Director George Tenet has apparently managed to keep the CIA on the straight and narrow during the debate over Iraq.
Although close to President Bush, Tenet has, nevertheless, maintained a degree of independence. One example is the letter he recently sent to the House-Senate committee looking into the 9/11 attacks. In it, the CIA argued that it is unlikely Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would initiate a chemical or biological attack against the USA, unless he is first provoked by an American military strike.
Not exactly the message the White House was trying to send.
When asked earlier by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., what intelligence he had that necessitated a quick vote on whether to go to war, Tenet answered honestly. "He didn't have anything new," Byrd said later.
Some in Congress worry about the schizophrenic view of Iraq they hear described by members of the administration. On the one hand, there are the breathless public pronouncements by the White House that Iraq appears on the verge of attacking the United States with horrendous weapons of mass destruction. But in secret sessions, the CIA apparently expresses the opposite view — that Iraq, while worrisome, is largely contained and poses no direct or immediate threat to the country.
"It's troubling to have classified information that contradicts statements made by the administration," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. "There's more they should share with the public."
Among the examples of the administration's less-than-forthright pronouncements:
In his Oct. 7 address to the nation, Bush warned of Iraq's attempts to import hardened aluminum tubes "for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." But David Albright, a physicist and former United Nations weapons inspector, told The Guardian that it was far from clear that the tubes were intended for such a purpose. He also said skeptics at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had been ordered to keep their doubts to themselves.
In his latest attempt to link Iraq and al-Qaeda, Bush referred to a "very senior al-Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." But the administration has given no indication that Abu Musab Zarqawi collaborated with senior Iraqi officials.
Bush also charged that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases." Former CIA officer Robert Baer, who spent years following al-Qaeda, told The Guardian that there were contacts between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqi government in Sudan in the early 1990s and in 1998. "But," he added, "there is no evidence that a strategic partnership came out of it. I'm unaware of any evidence of Saddam pursuing terrorism against the United States."
Bush mentioned for the first time that the Iraqi regime was developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — drones — that "could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas." He warned, "We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States." But these have a maximum range of only a few hundred miles and in no way could be flown halfway around the world.
Bush cautioned that if Saddam managed to acquire radioactive material no bigger than "a softball," he could build a nuclear weapon. Even if that were true, he has no way to deliver a nuclear warhead to the United States. His ability to build sophisticated, skyscraper-size intercontinental ballistic missiles, along with launch platforms and control facilities, is at least decades away.
The ability of Congress to receive independent, unbiased intelligence is essential. But that may soon be put in jeopardy. The administration is pushing a plan that would largely shift control of the intelligence community from the director of Central Intelligence to a new Pentagon intelligence czar.
Although about 85% of the intelligence community already comes under the Pentagon's umbrella, the CIA director still largely maintains control of the final estimates and analysis. Creating a powerful new intelligence czar under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could shift this delicate balance away from the more independent-minded Tenet and increase the chances that intelligence estimates might be "cooked" in favor of the Pentagon.
As Bush's "strike first, ask questions later" doctrine continues, with the prospect of endless wars and endless terrorism in retaliation, the need for honest intelligence reports becomes paramount. But if the Pentagon runs the spy world, the public and Congress will be reduced to a modern-day Diogenes, forever searching for that one honest report.
Only 4 Rumsfeld appointees gathering Iraq evidence
Rumsfeld Explains Role of Defense Group Analyzing Intel
By Kathleen T. Rhem
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Oct. 24, 2002
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld clarified today the role of a small group that's "poring over" intelligence reports in DoD's policy wing.
Shortly after Sept. 11, "a small group -- I think two to start with and maybe four now -- of people in the policy shop were asked to begin poring over this mountain of information that we were receiving of intelligence-type things," Rumsfeld said during a Pentagon media briefing.
The secretary was clarifying an account in a New York Times article today that suggested the DoD group is looking for ties between Iraq and al Qaeda that traditional intelligence assets had missed. The article also suggested Rumsfeld is unhappy with the intelligence information he is receiving from those traditional sources, such as the CIA.
Not so, Rumsfeld said.
"There is a very effective interaction going on" between the Defense Department and the CIA, he said, noting he receives a CIA brief every day.
"It is an excellent relationship between the Department of Defense and the intelligence community in this sense," he said. "(CIA Director) George Tenet and I couldn't have a closer relationship."
The secretary also dismissed the notion that this small group within the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy is collecting intelligence on its own.
Because intelligence information is generally the analyst's "best estimate," officials will receive conflicting opinions on the information's significance, Rumsfeld said.
"What comes out of intelligence are not fixed, firm conclusions," he said. "What comes out are speculation, analysis, probabilities, possibilities, estimates, assessments."
Then policy makers "take that information, look at it, think about it, and then make judgments off of it," he said.
By Kathleen T. Rhem
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Oct. 24, 2002
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld clarified today the role of a small group that's "poring over" intelligence reports in DoD's policy wing.
Shortly after Sept. 11, "a small group -- I think two to start with and maybe four now -- of people in the policy shop were asked to begin poring over this mountain of information that we were receiving of intelligence-type things," Rumsfeld said during a Pentagon media briefing.
The secretary was clarifying an account in a New York Times article today that suggested the DoD group is looking for ties between Iraq and al Qaeda that traditional intelligence assets had missed. The article also suggested Rumsfeld is unhappy with the intelligence information he is receiving from those traditional sources, such as the CIA.
Not so, Rumsfeld said.
"There is a very effective interaction going on" between the Defense Department and the CIA, he said, noting he receives a CIA brief every day.
"It is an excellent relationship between the Department of Defense and the intelligence community in this sense," he said. "(CIA Director) George Tenet and I couldn't have a closer relationship."
The secretary also dismissed the notion that this small group within the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy is collecting intelligence on its own.
Because intelligence information is generally the analyst's "best estimate," officials will receive conflicting opinions on the information's significance, Rumsfeld said.
"What comes out of intelligence are not fixed, firm conclusions," he said. "What comes out are speculation, analysis, probabilities, possibilities, estimates, assessments."
Then policy makers "take that information, look at it, think about it, and then make judgments off of it," he said.
Pentagon Sets Up Intelligence Unit
Pentagon Sets Up Intelligence Unit
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
October 24, 2002
WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his senior advisers have assigned a small intelligence unit to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists that the nation's spy agencies may have overlooked, Pentagon officials said today.
Some officials say the creation of the team reflects frustration on the part of Mr. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and other senior officials that they are not receiving undiluted information on the capacities of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and his suspected ties to terrorist organizations.
But officials who disagree say the top civilian policy makers are intent on politicizing intelligence to fit their hawkish views on Iraq.
In particular, many in the intelligence agencies disagree that Mr. Hussein can be directly linked to Osama bin Laden and his network, Al Qaeda, or that the two are likely to make common cause against the United States. In addition, the view among even some senior intelligence analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency is that Mr. Hussein is contained and is unlikely to unleash weapons of mass destruction unless he is attacked.
But Mr. Rumsfeld's inner circle of advisers view Mr. Hussein's record, which includes aggression against Kuwait and the use of poison gas against his people, as much more alarming, and they are not willing to risk leaving him in power. They cite numerous intelligence findings indicating links between the Iraq and senior Qaeda leaders.
The four- to five-person intelligence team was established by Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and another strong advocate for military action against Mr. Hussein. It was formed not long after the Sept. 11 attacks to take on special assignments in the global war on terror.
The team's specialty is using powerful computers and new software to scan and sort documents and reports from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies.
The team's current task, described by one official as "data mining," is to glean individual details that may collectively point to Iraq's wider connections to terrorism, but which may have been obscured by formal assessments that play down the overall Iraqi threat.
In an interview tonight, Mr. Wolfowitz said the members of the special intelligence team "are helping us sift through enormous amounts of incredibly valuable data that our many intelligence resources have vacuumed up." He emphasized, "They are not making independent intelligence assessments."
He described "a phenomenon in intelligence work, that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't, and not see other facts that others will."
"The lens through which you're looking for facts affects what you look for," he added.
But as adherents of different views on the Iraqi threat use intelligence findings to argue their case, Mr. Wolfowitz said, "It should not permit you to create facts or deny facts."
"The correct process is one that surfaces as many facts as possible," he added.
By law, the sprawling American intelligence bureaucracy is managed by the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who also is in charge of the best-known spy organization, the Central Intelligence Agency. Separate intelligence units also are operated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Departments of State, Energy and the Treasury.
But nearly 80 percent of the overall budget for intelligence is within the Defense Department and managed by Mr. Rumsfeld. This classified sum is divided among such organizations as the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the intelligence arms of the armed services.
Agencies like the N.S.A. and the D.I.A. in effect have two masters, since the defense secretary controls the budget and is a significant client of their information, while the director of central intelligence watches over the entire constellation of spy organizations.
Tension between the defense secretary and the C.I.A., which has resented moves by Mr. Rumsfeld to beef up the Pentagon's role in intelligence gathering, has been intensifying, according to one defense official.
"There is a complete breakdown in the relationship between the Defense Department and the intelligence community, to include its own Defense Intelligence Agency," the official said. "Wolfowitz and company disbelieve any analysis that doesn't support their own preconceived conclusions. The C.I.A. is enemy territory, as far are they're concerned."
Senior Pentagon aides reject that criticism, with Mr. Wolfowitz saying tonight that both he and Mr. Rumsfeld rely on their C.I.A. briefings as "our main source of information."
But other senior Pentagon officials say Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Feith are consciously challenging "cherished beliefs and assumptions" that they believe prevent intelligence analysts from focusing on certain information. In addition, those officials said, Mr. Rumsfeld and his senior advisers are laboring to strip away risk assessments that they say should be left to policy makers.
"Yes, there's frustration, but don't make this out to be a conspiracy," said another Defense Department official. "We're not politicizing intelligence. We're just trying to get another angle on this."
Or as another top Pentagon aide described the team's purpose: "We've seen a distinct need for multiple sources of intelligence for some time. It's an ongoing supplementary effort to insure that top policy makers get the most information possible."
Although the team was created one year ago, its existence is only now becoming known outside of Mr. Rumsfeld's inner circle as the debate over the administration's Iraq policy intensifies.
The new team is the latest example of an often contentious relationship between Mr. Rumsfeld and his top policy makers on one side, and intelligence agencies on the other.
Mr. Rumsfeld, for example, has moved to strengthen his control over the military's intelligence apparatus by proposing a civilian position reporting directly to him to manage the sprawling operation.
He is also considering ways to expand the role of Special Operations forces in the campaign against terrorism, including getting them more deeply involved in long-term covert operations that traditionally have been the domain of the C.I.A.
The work of the new team at the Pentagon is becoming well known among senior-level officials throughout the Bush administration.
One senior administration official defended the effort, saying that regardless of whether analysis of intelligence reports is done by intelligence agencies or policy makers, both are at some level "informed speculation." The official said it should not be surprising that there are differences of opinion in a large administration.
Mr. Rumsfeld voiced his concerns this week about the difficulty of predicting the most dramatic threats to national security. During a Pentagon news briefing on Tuesday, he quoted from a National Intelligence Estimate written on March 21, 1962.
That summary of findings said it was "unlikely that the Soviet bloc will provide Cuba with strategic weapons," Mr. Rumsfeld said, noting however that the Cuban missile crisis came the following October."
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
October 24, 2002
WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his senior advisers have assigned a small intelligence unit to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists that the nation's spy agencies may have overlooked, Pentagon officials said today.
Some officials say the creation of the team reflects frustration on the part of Mr. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and other senior officials that they are not receiving undiluted information on the capacities of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and his suspected ties to terrorist organizations.
But officials who disagree say the top civilian policy makers are intent on politicizing intelligence to fit their hawkish views on Iraq.
In particular, many in the intelligence agencies disagree that Mr. Hussein can be directly linked to Osama bin Laden and his network, Al Qaeda, or that the two are likely to make common cause against the United States. In addition, the view among even some senior intelligence analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency is that Mr. Hussein is contained and is unlikely to unleash weapons of mass destruction unless he is attacked.
But Mr. Rumsfeld's inner circle of advisers view Mr. Hussein's record, which includes aggression against Kuwait and the use of poison gas against his people, as much more alarming, and they are not willing to risk leaving him in power. They cite numerous intelligence findings indicating links between the Iraq and senior Qaeda leaders.
The four- to five-person intelligence team was established by Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and another strong advocate for military action against Mr. Hussein. It was formed not long after the Sept. 11 attacks to take on special assignments in the global war on terror.
The team's specialty is using powerful computers and new software to scan and sort documents and reports from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies.
The team's current task, described by one official as "data mining," is to glean individual details that may collectively point to Iraq's wider connections to terrorism, but which may have been obscured by formal assessments that play down the overall Iraqi threat.
In an interview tonight, Mr. Wolfowitz said the members of the special intelligence team "are helping us sift through enormous amounts of incredibly valuable data that our many intelligence resources have vacuumed up." He emphasized, "They are not making independent intelligence assessments."
He described "a phenomenon in intelligence work, that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't, and not see other facts that others will."
"The lens through which you're looking for facts affects what you look for," he added.
But as adherents of different views on the Iraqi threat use intelligence findings to argue their case, Mr. Wolfowitz said, "It should not permit you to create facts or deny facts."
"The correct process is one that surfaces as many facts as possible," he added.
By law, the sprawling American intelligence bureaucracy is managed by the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who also is in charge of the best-known spy organization, the Central Intelligence Agency. Separate intelligence units also are operated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Departments of State, Energy and the Treasury.
But nearly 80 percent of the overall budget for intelligence is within the Defense Department and managed by Mr. Rumsfeld. This classified sum is divided among such organizations as the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the intelligence arms of the armed services.
Agencies like the N.S.A. and the D.I.A. in effect have two masters, since the defense secretary controls the budget and is a significant client of their information, while the director of central intelligence watches over the entire constellation of spy organizations.
Tension between the defense secretary and the C.I.A., which has resented moves by Mr. Rumsfeld to beef up the Pentagon's role in intelligence gathering, has been intensifying, according to one defense official.
"There is a complete breakdown in the relationship between the Defense Department and the intelligence community, to include its own Defense Intelligence Agency," the official said. "Wolfowitz and company disbelieve any analysis that doesn't support their own preconceived conclusions. The C.I.A. is enemy territory, as far are they're concerned."
Senior Pentagon aides reject that criticism, with Mr. Wolfowitz saying tonight that both he and Mr. Rumsfeld rely on their C.I.A. briefings as "our main source of information."
But other senior Pentagon officials say Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Feith are consciously challenging "cherished beliefs and assumptions" that they believe prevent intelligence analysts from focusing on certain information. In addition, those officials said, Mr. Rumsfeld and his senior advisers are laboring to strip away risk assessments that they say should be left to policy makers.
"Yes, there's frustration, but don't make this out to be a conspiracy," said another Defense Department official. "We're not politicizing intelligence. We're just trying to get another angle on this."
Or as another top Pentagon aide described the team's purpose: "We've seen a distinct need for multiple sources of intelligence for some time. It's an ongoing supplementary effort to insure that top policy makers get the most information possible."
Although the team was created one year ago, its existence is only now becoming known outside of Mr. Rumsfeld's inner circle as the debate over the administration's Iraq policy intensifies.
The new team is the latest example of an often contentious relationship between Mr. Rumsfeld and his top policy makers on one side, and intelligence agencies on the other.
Mr. Rumsfeld, for example, has moved to strengthen his control over the military's intelligence apparatus by proposing a civilian position reporting directly to him to manage the sprawling operation.
He is also considering ways to expand the role of Special Operations forces in the campaign against terrorism, including getting them more deeply involved in long-term covert operations that traditionally have been the domain of the C.I.A.
The work of the new team at the Pentagon is becoming well known among senior-level officials throughout the Bush administration.
One senior administration official defended the effort, saying that regardless of whether analysis of intelligence reports is done by intelligence agencies or policy makers, both are at some level "informed speculation." The official said it should not be surprising that there are differences of opinion in a large administration.
Mr. Rumsfeld voiced his concerns this week about the difficulty of predicting the most dramatic threats to national security. During a Pentagon news briefing on Tuesday, he quoted from a National Intelligence Estimate written on March 21, 1962.
That summary of findings said it was "unlikely that the Soviet bloc will provide Cuba with strategic weapons," Mr. Rumsfeld said, noting however that the Cuban missile crisis came the following October."
CIA being pressured for Iraq evidence
USA Today
Maintain CIA's independence
By James Bamford for USA TODAY
24 Oct 2002
As the White House searches for every possible excuse to go to war with Iraq, pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda. In this case, the agencies are being pressed to find a casus belli for war, whether or not one exists.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements, and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," Vince Cannistraro, the agency's former head of counterterrorism, told The Guardian, a London newspaper.
This confirms what Knight-Ridder reporters found: "A growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war," the news service reported recently. "They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary."
In the case of Iraq, the consequence of a serious manipulation of the truth could be the loss of thousands of American lives. Fortunately, CIA Director George Tenet has apparently managed to keep the CIA on the straight and narrow during the debate over Iraq.
Although close to President Bush, Tenet has, nevertheless, maintained a degree of independence. One example is the letter he recently sent to the House-Senate committee looking into the 9/11 attacks. In it, the CIA argued that it is unlikely Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would initiate a chemical or biological attack against the USA, unless he is first provoked by an American military strike.
Not exactly the message the White House was trying to send.
When asked earlier by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., what intelligence he had that necessitated a quick vote on whether to go to war, Tenet answered honestly. "He didn't have anything new," Byrd said later.
Some in Congress worry about the schizophrenic view of Iraq they hear described by members of the administration. On the one hand, there are the breathless public pronouncements by the White House that Iraq appears on the verge of attacking the United States with horrendous weapons of mass destruction. But in secret sessions, the CIA apparently expresses the opposite view — that Iraq, while worrisome, is largely contained and poses no direct or immediate threat to the country.
"It's troubling to have classified information that contradicts statements made by the administration," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. "There's more they should share with the public."
Among the examples of the administration's less-than-forthright pronouncements:
The ability of Congress to receive independent, unbiased intelligence is essential. But that may soon be put in jeopardy. The administration is pushing a plan that would largely shift control of the intelligence community from the director of Central Intelligence to a new Pentagon intelligence czar.
Although about 85% of the intelligence community already comes under the Pentagon's umbrella, the CIA director still largely maintains control of the final estimates and analysis. Creating a powerful new intelligence czar under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could shift this delicate balance away from the more independent-minded Tenet and increase the chances that intelligence estimates might be "cooked" in favor of the Pentagon.
As Bush's "strike first, ask questions later" doctrine continues, with the prospect of endless wars and endless terrorism in retaliation, the need for honest intelligence reports becomes paramount. But if the Pentagon runs the spy world, the public and Congress will be reduced to a modern-day Diogenes, forever searching for that one honest report.
James Bamford, author of Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
Maintain CIA's independence
By James Bamford for USA TODAY
24 Oct 2002
As the White House searches for every possible excuse to go to war with Iraq, pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda. In this case, the agencies are being pressed to find a casus belli for war, whether or not one exists.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements, and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," Vince Cannistraro, the agency's former head of counterterrorism, told The Guardian, a London newspaper.
This confirms what Knight-Ridder reporters found: "A growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war," the news service reported recently. "They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary."
In the case of Iraq, the consequence of a serious manipulation of the truth could be the loss of thousands of American lives. Fortunately, CIA Director George Tenet has apparently managed to keep the CIA on the straight and narrow during the debate over Iraq.
Although close to President Bush, Tenet has, nevertheless, maintained a degree of independence. One example is the letter he recently sent to the House-Senate committee looking into the 9/11 attacks. In it, the CIA argued that it is unlikely Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would initiate a chemical or biological attack against the USA, unless he is first provoked by an American military strike.
Not exactly the message the White House was trying to send.
When asked earlier by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., what intelligence he had that necessitated a quick vote on whether to go to war, Tenet answered honestly. "He didn't have anything new," Byrd said later.
Some in Congress worry about the schizophrenic view of Iraq they hear described by members of the administration. On the one hand, there are the breathless public pronouncements by the White House that Iraq appears on the verge of attacking the United States with horrendous weapons of mass destruction. But in secret sessions, the CIA apparently expresses the opposite view — that Iraq, while worrisome, is largely contained and poses no direct or immediate threat to the country.
"It's troubling to have classified information that contradicts statements made by the administration," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. "There's more they should share with the public."
Among the examples of the administration's less-than-forthright pronouncements:
- In his Oct. 7 address to the nation, Bush warned of Iraq's attempts to import hardened aluminum tubes "for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." But David Albright, a physicist and former United Nations weapons inspector, told The Guardian that it was far from clear that the tubes were intended for such a purpose. He also said skeptics at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had been ordered to keep their doubts to themselves.
- In his latest attempt to link Iraq and al-Qaeda, Bush referred to a "very senior al-Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." But the administration has given no indication that Abu Musab Zarqawi collaborated with senior Iraqi officials.
- Bush also charged that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases." Former CIA officer Robert Baer, who spent years following al-Qaeda, told The Guardian that there were contacts between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqi government in Sudan in the early 1990s and in 1998. "But," he added, "there is no evidence that a strategic partnership came out of it. I'm unaware of any evidence of Saddam pursuing terrorism against the United States."
- Bush mentioned for the first time that the Iraqi regime was developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — drones — that "could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas." He warned, "We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States." But these have a maximum range of only a few hundred miles and in no way could be flown halfway around the world.
- Bush cautioned that if Saddam managed to acquire radioactive material no bigger than "a softball," he could build a nuclear weapon. Even if that were true, he has no way to deliver a nuclear warhead to the United States. His ability to build sophisticated, skyscraper-size intercontinental ballistic missiles, along with launch platforms and control facilities, is at least decades away.
The ability of Congress to receive independent, unbiased intelligence is essential. But that may soon be put in jeopardy. The administration is pushing a plan that would largely shift control of the intelligence community from the director of Central Intelligence to a new Pentagon intelligence czar.
Although about 85% of the intelligence community already comes under the Pentagon's umbrella, the CIA director still largely maintains control of the final estimates and analysis. Creating a powerful new intelligence czar under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could shift this delicate balance away from the more independent-minded Tenet and increase the chances that intelligence estimates might be "cooked" in favor of the Pentagon.
As Bush's "strike first, ask questions later" doctrine continues, with the prospect of endless wars and endless terrorism in retaliation, the need for honest intelligence reports becomes paramount. But if the Pentagon runs the spy world, the public and Congress will be reduced to a modern-day Diogenes, forever searching for that one honest report.
James Bamford, author of Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
Monday, October 21, 2002
Politics and the CIA
Time Magazine
Politics and the CIA
The agency is supposed to provide honest intel on Iraq. But does the Administration want to hear it?
By Douglass Waller and Massimo Calabresi
Oct. 21, 2002
For more than a year, George Bush stood by CIA Director George Tenet, dismissing critics who said the agency failed at its core mission — preventing attacks against the homeland. But loyalty is a two-way street for this White House, and since Bush began making his case for war with Iraq, his aides — particularly the hard-line ones — have pressed Tenet to join the march. For the President's war speech in Cincinnati last week, Bush aides badgered the CIA to declassify more intelligence on Saddam Hussein's ties to Osama bin Laden. As a result, Bush was able to disclose that " a very...
Politics and the CIA
The agency is supposed to provide honest intel on Iraq. But does the Administration want to hear it?
By Douglass Waller and Massimo Calabresi
Oct. 21, 2002
For more than a year, George Bush stood by CIA Director George Tenet, dismissing critics who said the agency failed at its core mission — preventing attacks against the homeland. But loyalty is a two-way street for this White House, and since Bush began making his case for war with Iraq, his aides — particularly the hard-line ones — have pressed Tenet to join the march. For the President's war speech in Cincinnati last week, Bush aides badgered the CIA to declassify more intelligence on Saddam Hussein's ties to Osama bin Laden. As a result, Bush was able to disclose that " a very...
Sunday, October 20, 2002
CIA's New Old Iraq File
Washington Post
CIA's New Old Iraq File
By Jim HoaglandSunday
October 20, 2002; Page B07
Imagine that Saddam Hussein has been offering terrorist training and other lethal support to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda for years. You can't imagine that? Sign up over there. You can be a Middle East analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Or at least you could have been until recently. As President Bush's determination to overthrow the Iraqi dictator has become evident to all, a cultural change has come over the world's most expensive intelligence agency: Some analysts out at Langley are now willing to evaluate incriminating evidence against the Iraqis and call it just that.
That development has triggered a fierce internal agency struggle pitting officials whose careers and reputations were built on the old analysis of the Iraqis as a feckless, inert and inward-looking bunch of thugs against those willing to take a fresh, untilted look at all the evidence.
One breeze of change came in President Bush's Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati. Among the terror-related items that were declassified for the speech was an agency finding that Iraq is developing "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles" to deliver chemical and biological weapons on U.S. targets.
That was new stuff, delivered by a determined and effective CIA collection effort earlier this year. Agency information also allowed the president to assert (accurately) that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."
That's actually old new stuff, stored in CIA files since the mid-1990s. But that intelligence was quietly buried during the Clinton years, when the need not to know very much about Iraq and terrorism was very strong.
This is how war is waged inside the CIA: The upstarts who are challenging the agency's long-standing and deeply flawed analysis of Iraq are being accused of "politicizing intelligence," a label that is a reputation-killer in the intelligence world. It is also a protective shield for analysts who do not want, any more than the rest of us, to acknowledge that they have been profoundly and damagingly mistaken.
The "politicization" accusation suggests that those who find Iraqi links to al Qaeda are primarily interested in currying favor with the Bush White House. It comes primarily from those who won favor in the Clinton years with an analysis based on the proposition that an Arab nationalist such as Saddam Hussein would never cooperate with the Islamic fanatics of al Qaeda. They are now out in the cold in the Bush-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz era.
Their work is only one part of a monumental record of failure on Iraq by the CIA, which has at different moments sought to understand, support, co-opt and then overthrow Hussein. The agency succeeded in none. Considering the extent of that failure, it is no surprise that Bush has until now relied little on the Langley agency for his information on Iraq. There is simply no way to reconcile what the CIA has said on the record and in leaks with the positions Bush has taken on Iraq.
One year before Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the agency produced a National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iraq was too exhausted and internally occupied to think about war. A supervisor's request to analysts to take a second look at those findings triggered accusations of "politicizing intelligence," says a former CIA official involved in that debate. The mistaken view prevailed and guided the CIA's assessment in July 1990 that no invasion of Kuwait was about to occur.
Such misjudgments have continued until today. After four months of inconclusive debate following Sept. 11, the agency produced a new analysis last spring titled: "Iraq and al Qaeda: A Murky Relationship." It fails to make much of a case for anything, I am told. It echoes the views of Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia, and other analysts who have consistently expressed doubts that Iraq has engaged in international terrorism or trained others to do so since 1993.
More damaging to their case than the accumulating new evidence to the contrary is "old" information long available in CIA files: Iraqi intelligence officers meeting in Khartoum and Kandahar with Osama bin Laden, the nonaggression pact Saddam and Osama reached in 1993, training in Baghdad for international terrorism and the multiple trips to Prague made by Mohamed Atta, the head of the Sept. 11 suicide squads, are all there. These specific reports and much more have been explained away and minimized rather than thoroughly investigated.
Congress should not expect the CIA "to be 100 percent flawless all the time," Director George Tenet complained defensively on Thursday as he was buffeted by questions about the agency's failure to anticipate Sept. 11. The problem is broader, he said: "The country's mind-set has to be changed fundamentally."
The man has a point. But Congress can reasonably expect the agency not to be wrong close to 100 percent all the time on such an important subject as Iraq.
And the place for Tenet to start changing mind-sets is right there at Langley. Unless, of course, he agrees with that mind-set.
CIA's New Old Iraq File
By Jim HoaglandSunday
October 20, 2002; Page B07
Imagine that Saddam Hussein has been offering terrorist training and other lethal support to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda for years. You can't imagine that? Sign up over there. You can be a Middle East analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Or at least you could have been until recently. As President Bush's determination to overthrow the Iraqi dictator has become evident to all, a cultural change has come over the world's most expensive intelligence agency: Some analysts out at Langley are now willing to evaluate incriminating evidence against the Iraqis and call it just that.
That development has triggered a fierce internal agency struggle pitting officials whose careers and reputations were built on the old analysis of the Iraqis as a feckless, inert and inward-looking bunch of thugs against those willing to take a fresh, untilted look at all the evidence.
One breeze of change came in President Bush's Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati. Among the terror-related items that were declassified for the speech was an agency finding that Iraq is developing "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles" to deliver chemical and biological weapons on U.S. targets.
That was new stuff, delivered by a determined and effective CIA collection effort earlier this year. Agency information also allowed the president to assert (accurately) that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."
That's actually old new stuff, stored in CIA files since the mid-1990s. But that intelligence was quietly buried during the Clinton years, when the need not to know very much about Iraq and terrorism was very strong.
This is how war is waged inside the CIA: The upstarts who are challenging the agency's long-standing and deeply flawed analysis of Iraq are being accused of "politicizing intelligence," a label that is a reputation-killer in the intelligence world. It is also a protective shield for analysts who do not want, any more than the rest of us, to acknowledge that they have been profoundly and damagingly mistaken.
The "politicization" accusation suggests that those who find Iraqi links to al Qaeda are primarily interested in currying favor with the Bush White House. It comes primarily from those who won favor in the Clinton years with an analysis based on the proposition that an Arab nationalist such as Saddam Hussein would never cooperate with the Islamic fanatics of al Qaeda. They are now out in the cold in the Bush-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz era.
Their work is only one part of a monumental record of failure on Iraq by the CIA, which has at different moments sought to understand, support, co-opt and then overthrow Hussein. The agency succeeded in none. Considering the extent of that failure, it is no surprise that Bush has until now relied little on the Langley agency for his information on Iraq. There is simply no way to reconcile what the CIA has said on the record and in leaks with the positions Bush has taken on Iraq.
One year before Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the agency produced a National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iraq was too exhausted and internally occupied to think about war. A supervisor's request to analysts to take a second look at those findings triggered accusations of "politicizing intelligence," says a former CIA official involved in that debate. The mistaken view prevailed and guided the CIA's assessment in July 1990 that no invasion of Kuwait was about to occur.
Such misjudgments have continued until today. After four months of inconclusive debate following Sept. 11, the agency produced a new analysis last spring titled: "Iraq and al Qaeda: A Murky Relationship." It fails to make much of a case for anything, I am told. It echoes the views of Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia, and other analysts who have consistently expressed doubts that Iraq has engaged in international terrorism or trained others to do so since 1993.
More damaging to their case than the accumulating new evidence to the contrary is "old" information long available in CIA files: Iraqi intelligence officers meeting in Khartoum and Kandahar with Osama bin Laden, the nonaggression pact Saddam and Osama reached in 1993, training in Baghdad for international terrorism and the multiple trips to Prague made by Mohamed Atta, the head of the Sept. 11 suicide squads, are all there. These specific reports and much more have been explained away and minimized rather than thoroughly investigated.
Congress should not expect the CIA "to be 100 percent flawless all the time," Director George Tenet complained defensively on Thursday as he was buffeted by questions about the agency's failure to anticipate Sept. 11. The problem is broader, he said: "The country's mind-set has to be changed fundamentally."
The man has a point. But Congress can reasonably expect the agency not to be wrong close to 100 percent all the time on such an important subject as Iraq.
And the place for Tenet to start changing mind-sets is right there at Langley. Unless, of course, he agrees with that mind-set.
Monday, October 14, 2002
Politics and the CIA
CNN - 14 Oct 2002
Politics and the CIA
By Douglas Waller and Massimo Calabresi
The agency is supposed to provide honest intel on Iraq. But does the Administration want to hear it?
For more than a year, george bush stood by CIA Director George Tenet, dismissing critics who said the agency failed at its core mission--preventing attacks against the homeland.
But loyalty is a two-way street for this White House, and since Bush began making his case for war with Iraq, his aides--particularly the hard-line ones--have pressed Tenet to join the march. For the President's war speech in Cincinnati last week, Bush aides badgered the CIA to declassify more intelligence on Saddam Hussein's ties to Osama bin Laden.
As a result, Bush was able to disclose that "a very senior al-Qaeda leader received medical treatment in Baghdad this year" (intelligence sources tell Time that it is a Jordanian operational commander named Abu Musab Zarqawi) and that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bombmaking and poisons and deadly gases."
But when a recently released CIA report seemed to paint too dire a picture of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee pressured Tenet to declassify testimony by a top aide who rated the likelihood of Saddam's initiating a chemical or biological weapons attack against the U.S. as "low." That testimony appeared to contradict Bush's claim in Cincinnati that Saddam could lob those weapons at the U.S. or its allies "on any given day."
Bush sympathizers saw a sellout by the CIA. "That wasn't intelligence, that was pure speculation," groused a former senior Pentagon official. So which is it? Is the CIA politicizing the intelligence on Iraq to help the hard-liners persuade people that war is in the national interest? Or is Tenet, a former Senate staff member with keen survival instincts, working to keep the moderates happy too?
Tenet denies both charges. "It's ludicrous," he told Time. "I work for a guy who expects our honest judgment, period. There's no cooking of the books." Every faction in the Administration reads the evidence gathered by the CIA about Iraq's actions and capabilities in different ways--usually to justify its preferred outcome.
And then the factions press for more. The agency has tried not to take sides, but the rift between it and the Administration hawks is widening as the White House "pushes the envelope" on evidence against Saddam, says a senior intelligence official. The pressure from the hard-liners to paint Saddam in the most dangerous hues "is intense," the official explains. "There is one overriding emphasis, and that is to sell the policy of regime change."
The friction is greatest on the question of whether Iraq and al-Qaeda are working together against the U.S. Some intelligence analysts accuse Bush of grasping at examples that imply an alliance while ignoring others that don't--like the fact that in the past the secular Saddam and the fundamentalist bin Laden have not been ideological soul mates. (Bin Laden offered to fight against Saddam when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991.)
Complicating the fight is the fact that the spooks don't want to overlook evidence on Iraq--as they did with al-Qaeda--so they are trying to turn over every stone. For example, a top Iraqi intelligence official visited bin Laden in Sudan in the mid-1990s, an intelligence source tells Time.
There is also more evidence that al-Qaeda operatives who turned up recently in Baghdad may have been plotting chemical-weapons attacks on U.S. soil. "As we peel the onion," says another senior U.S. intelligence official, "we continue to find things that indicate people should at least be troubled and pay attention to the relationship [between Saddam and bin Laden]."
The peeling, however, hasn't quelled complaints from both hawks and doves that the agency tilts its product. Agency analysts are more pessimistic than are White House hard-liners about possible chaos in Iraq after a U.S. invasion. (The Administration is considering a broad military occupation of Iraq much like the U.S. Army's presence in Japan after World War II.)
But State Department intelligence officials remain unconvinced that high-strength aluminum tubes Baghdad has been trying to import are meant to be used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, as the CIA claims. The tubes, they argue, could just as easily be used to manufacture conventional arms.
"It's all politics," says a senior CIA hand. "We're the meat in the sandwich. People hear what they want to hear from our reports." Agency insiders say that if Tenet tried anything heavy-handed to please one side or the other, he would have a rebellion on his hands from CIA analysts. Insists Tenet: "We draw lines in the sand about anybody ever telling us what to do. I wouldn't stand for it, and the President wouldn't stand for it." Tenet fact-checked a footnoted version of Bush's Cincinnati speech before the President delivered it, correcting a few items and satisfying himself that it represented the agency's view.
So perhaps it is not surprising that, according to a White House aide, Bush was miffed that testimony Tenet later declassified seemed to contradict part of his speech. Tenet wasted no time rectifying the situation. The next day he issued an unusual clarification that there was "no inconsistency" between the CIA's view and that of the President.
--With reporting by James Carney and Michael Duffy/Washington
Politics and the CIA
By Douglas Waller and Massimo Calabresi
The agency is supposed to provide honest intel on Iraq. But does the Administration want to hear it?
For more than a year, george bush stood by CIA Director George Tenet, dismissing critics who said the agency failed at its core mission--preventing attacks against the homeland.
But loyalty is a two-way street for this White House, and since Bush began making his case for war with Iraq, his aides--particularly the hard-line ones--have pressed Tenet to join the march. For the President's war speech in Cincinnati last week, Bush aides badgered the CIA to declassify more intelligence on Saddam Hussein's ties to Osama bin Laden.
As a result, Bush was able to disclose that "a very senior al-Qaeda leader received medical treatment in Baghdad this year" (intelligence sources tell Time that it is a Jordanian operational commander named Abu Musab Zarqawi) and that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bombmaking and poisons and deadly gases."
But when a recently released CIA report seemed to paint too dire a picture of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee pressured Tenet to declassify testimony by a top aide who rated the likelihood of Saddam's initiating a chemical or biological weapons attack against the U.S. as "low." That testimony appeared to contradict Bush's claim in Cincinnati that Saddam could lob those weapons at the U.S. or its allies "on any given day."
Bush sympathizers saw a sellout by the CIA. "That wasn't intelligence, that was pure speculation," groused a former senior Pentagon official. So which is it? Is the CIA politicizing the intelligence on Iraq to help the hard-liners persuade people that war is in the national interest? Or is Tenet, a former Senate staff member with keen survival instincts, working to keep the moderates happy too?
Tenet denies both charges. "It's ludicrous," he told Time. "I work for a guy who expects our honest judgment, period. There's no cooking of the books." Every faction in the Administration reads the evidence gathered by the CIA about Iraq's actions and capabilities in different ways--usually to justify its preferred outcome.
And then the factions press for more. The agency has tried not to take sides, but the rift between it and the Administration hawks is widening as the White House "pushes the envelope" on evidence against Saddam, says a senior intelligence official. The pressure from the hard-liners to paint Saddam in the most dangerous hues "is intense," the official explains. "There is one overriding emphasis, and that is to sell the policy of regime change."
The friction is greatest on the question of whether Iraq and al-Qaeda are working together against the U.S. Some intelligence analysts accuse Bush of grasping at examples that imply an alliance while ignoring others that don't--like the fact that in the past the secular Saddam and the fundamentalist bin Laden have not been ideological soul mates. (Bin Laden offered to fight against Saddam when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991.)
Complicating the fight is the fact that the spooks don't want to overlook evidence on Iraq--as they did with al-Qaeda--so they are trying to turn over every stone. For example, a top Iraqi intelligence official visited bin Laden in Sudan in the mid-1990s, an intelligence source tells Time.
There is also more evidence that al-Qaeda operatives who turned up recently in Baghdad may have been plotting chemical-weapons attacks on U.S. soil. "As we peel the onion," says another senior U.S. intelligence official, "we continue to find things that indicate people should at least be troubled and pay attention to the relationship [between Saddam and bin Laden]."
The peeling, however, hasn't quelled complaints from both hawks and doves that the agency tilts its product. Agency analysts are more pessimistic than are White House hard-liners about possible chaos in Iraq after a U.S. invasion. (The Administration is considering a broad military occupation of Iraq much like the U.S. Army's presence in Japan after World War II.)
But State Department intelligence officials remain unconvinced that high-strength aluminum tubes Baghdad has been trying to import are meant to be used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, as the CIA claims. The tubes, they argue, could just as easily be used to manufacture conventional arms.
"It's all politics," says a senior CIA hand. "We're the meat in the sandwich. People hear what they want to hear from our reports." Agency insiders say that if Tenet tried anything heavy-handed to please one side or the other, he would have a rebellion on his hands from CIA analysts. Insists Tenet: "We draw lines in the sand about anybody ever telling us what to do. I wouldn't stand for it, and the President wouldn't stand for it." Tenet fact-checked a footnoted version of Bush's Cincinnati speech before the President delivered it, correcting a few items and satisfying himself that it represented the agency's view.
So perhaps it is not surprising that, according to a White House aide, Bush was miffed that testimony Tenet later declassified seemed to contradict part of his speech. Tenet wasted no time rectifying the situation. The next day he issued an unusual clarification that there was "no inconsistency" between the CIA's view and that of the President.
--With reporting by James Carney and Michael Duffy/Washington
Sunday, October 13, 2002
Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong
Sunday Herald
13 October 2002
The president says the US has to act now against Iraq. The trouble is, his own security services don't agree. Neil Mackay reports
GEORGE Bush was about to be hoist by his own petard. It was Monday last week, and the president was glad-handing with the great and the good at the Cincinnati Museum Centre in Ohio as he waited to give one of his most bellicose speeches yet.
In the audience were Ohio state governor Bob Taft and a host of business and political luminaries. As the deadline approached for the Senate and House of Representatives vote on whether or not to give Bush the backing he wanted to attack Iraq, this speech was to be the president's final flourish in the propaganda war to get the US marching in line behind him.
Calling Saddam Hussein a 'murderous tyrant', he made it clear why America had to finish off the Iraqi dictator. 'Facing clear evidence of peril,' he told the audience, 'we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.' He went on: 'We have every reason to assume the worst and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from happening.'
What Bush could not have guessed was that his claims that Iraq was intent on attacking the USA had already began to unravel. The denouement started a few days before, on Thursday, October 3, when Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, metaphorically donned his hob-nailed boots and began delivering some well-aimed kicks to the head of George Tenet, the director of the CIA. The CIA, Graham said, were monkeying with democracy. The agency was not telling his committee what they needed to know about the Iraqi regime. Tenet was damaging the ability of Congress to assess the need for military action.
With one week until Congress voted on authorising Bush to use force, Graham was impatient. These are serious times, he said , and he needed serious answers. Graham and the committee had received an anodyne intelligence report from the CIA on the threat posed by Iraq the day before -- Wednesday, October 2. This, however, answered none of the questions the Senate committee wanted answered: would Saddam use weapons of mass destruction (WMD); how would his regime react if attacked; and what would be the consequences of war?
On October 9, almost a week after Tenet received his whipping at the hands of Graham, the senator's hardman approach paid off when the director of the CIA admitted that the only reason Saddam would use WMDs against the United States was if he was backed into a corner -- due to a strike by the American military -- and realised he was about to fall. Saddam, Tenet was saying, would only become the nightmare that Bush envisaged, if Bush attacked him first. Within two days, then, of Bush's flag-waving call to arms, his most senior intelligence officer had pulled the rug from under the biggest project of his presidency.
Tenet's admission left Bush in disarray with revelations making it appear as if the president was exaggerating the threat from Iraq, to say the least. Tenet, a loyal subject of the Bush administration, had no option but to come clean -- no matter how difficult a position it put the president in.
The CIA director's hands were tied on October 3 by Senator Graham, a democrat who represents Florida, when he told the CIA it was acting 'unacceptably', and added: 'We're trying to carry out a very important responsibility, and given the nature of this classified information, we are the only means by which the intelligence community can communicate to the legislative branch of government.'
There was no way that Tenet could play fast and loose with the Senate. Both the FBI and CIA have been attacked repeatedly in Congressional hearings since September 11 for a series of intelligence cock-ups.
Later on October 3, after Graham met with Tenet, his mood had changed -- Graham seemed to be cooler, calmer. He said the meeting had been frank and candid. What Graham wanted was a flavour of the classified National Intelligence Estimates, prepared by the National Intelligence Council, whose analysts report directly to Tenet. On Monday, October 7, around the time Bush was in Ohio cheerleading for war , Graham received just what he had been looking for -- it came in the shape of a letter from the CIA director. It made astonishing reading. Two days later, on Wednesday, October 9, the Senate intelligence committee voted to make the full text of Tenet's letter public.
Tenet's letter said he was declassifying selected material to help the Senate's deliberations on whether or not to support the president over attacking Iraq. 'Baghdad, for now, appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW (chemical and biological weapons) against the United States,' the declassified material read.
'Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means ... or CBW.
'Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the US would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.'
Tenet went on to declassify formerly secret evidence given at a closed hearing of the Senate's intelligence committee in which democrat Carl Levin, was told by a 'senior intelligence witness' that the 'probability ... would be low' of Saddam initiating a WMD attack. The agent also said the chances were 'pretty high' that Saddam would launch a WMD attack 'if we initiate an attack and he thought he was in extremis'. Tenet's revelations left the entire basis of Bush's call to arms in ruins, and the CIA director swiftly became an embarrassment to the president as the propaganda war backfired . Tenet was not deliberately trying to undermine Bush -- he was simply forced into a corner by the Senate and compelled to reveal his true understanding of the Iraqi crisis.
Kenneth M Pollack, who worked as a military analyst at the CIA before serving as a top aide on Persian Gulf affairs on President Clinton's National Security Council, said: 'The agency line is that it is basically unlikely that Iraq would give WMDs to terrorists under most circumstances. The Bush administration is trying to make the case that Iraq might try to give WMDs to al-Qaeda under certain circumstances. But what the agency is saying is that Saddam is likely to give such weapons to terrorists only under extreme circumstances when he believes he is likely to be toppled.'
The White House tried to put a different spin on the Tenet letter. Sean McCormack, the White House National Security Council spokesman, said the portions of the letter released by Graham gave a misleading impression of the CIA's overall conclusion. 'There were parts of the Tenet letter that weren't read in,' he said. Other parts were 'taken out of context', he said. However, Graham's spokesman, Paul Anderson, denied there had been any misquoting, and the full document, which the Senate committee has released, supports Anderson's line.
Lee Hamilton, the former chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, added pointedly: 'It's an overwhelming temptation to manipulate intelligence to serve policy and, to some extent, I think that's what's happening here with Iraq.'
Tenet did, however, leave the Bush conspiracists something to cling to. In his letter to Graham, he played up the alleged links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, saying: 'We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade.
Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression ... we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members ... we have credible reporting that al-Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq, who could help them acquire WMD capabilities ... Iraq has provided training to al-Qaeda members in areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.'
This was not a smoking gun, but it kept suspicions alive that Iraq might just pass terrorists WMDs any day now. Tenet's tentative connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda is a far cry from the findings of his counterparts in Europe. Try as it might, the UK has been unable to produce any evidence clearly linking Saddam to bin Laden, and the French have positively ruled out any connection. Jean-Louis Bruguire, France's leading terrorist investigator, says years of investigation into radical Islamic terror groups have not produced a trace of evidence linking them to Iraq.
Bruguire is an investigative magistrate empowered to view French domestic and foreign intelligence material. Much of the material he sees is passed on to the CIA and FBI by French intelligence. He says: 'We have not found any link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Not a trace. There is no foundation to our investigations for the information given by the Americans.'
The French believe the secular nature of Saddam's regime deters him from getting into bed with the likes of bin Laden. It also makes cosying up to Saddam an anathema to the fundamentalists of al-Qaeda. Despite the admissions in the Tenet letter, the Senate voted 77-23 in the early hours of last Friday morning to authorise Bush to use force against Iraq. Earlier, the House of Representatives had voted the same way by a margin of 296-133.
It seems that most of the Senate listened to the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's reply to claims that the White House was exaggerating the Iraqi threat.
'Each of us has a solemn responsibility,' he said, 'to do everything in our power to ensure that, when the history of this period is written, the books won't ask why we slept.'
The doubts of the intelligence community were washed away against such patriotic phrase-making. It should be noted, however, that a few senators listened to Tenet's admissions and voted 'no'. Among them was Senator Bob Graham.
13 October 2002
The president says the US has to act now against Iraq. The trouble is, his own security services don't agree. Neil Mackay reports
GEORGE Bush was about to be hoist by his own petard. It was Monday last week, and the president was glad-handing with the great and the good at the Cincinnati Museum Centre in Ohio as he waited to give one of his most bellicose speeches yet.
In the audience were Ohio state governor Bob Taft and a host of business and political luminaries. As the deadline approached for the Senate and House of Representatives vote on whether or not to give Bush the backing he wanted to attack Iraq, this speech was to be the president's final flourish in the propaganda war to get the US marching in line behind him.
Calling Saddam Hussein a 'murderous tyrant', he made it clear why America had to finish off the Iraqi dictator. 'Facing clear evidence of peril,' he told the audience, 'we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.' He went on: 'We have every reason to assume the worst and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from happening.'
What Bush could not have guessed was that his claims that Iraq was intent on attacking the USA had already began to unravel. The denouement started a few days before, on Thursday, October 3, when Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, metaphorically donned his hob-nailed boots and began delivering some well-aimed kicks to the head of George Tenet, the director of the CIA. The CIA, Graham said, were monkeying with democracy. The agency was not telling his committee what they needed to know about the Iraqi regime. Tenet was damaging the ability of Congress to assess the need for military action.
With one week until Congress voted on authorising Bush to use force, Graham was impatient. These are serious times, he said , and he needed serious answers. Graham and the committee had received an anodyne intelligence report from the CIA on the threat posed by Iraq the day before -- Wednesday, October 2. This, however, answered none of the questions the Senate committee wanted answered: would Saddam use weapons of mass destruction (WMD); how would his regime react if attacked; and what would be the consequences of war?
On October 9, almost a week after Tenet received his whipping at the hands of Graham, the senator's hardman approach paid off when the director of the CIA admitted that the only reason Saddam would use WMDs against the United States was if he was backed into a corner -- due to a strike by the American military -- and realised he was about to fall. Saddam, Tenet was saying, would only become the nightmare that Bush envisaged, if Bush attacked him first. Within two days, then, of Bush's flag-waving call to arms, his most senior intelligence officer had pulled the rug from under the biggest project of his presidency.
Tenet's admission left Bush in disarray with revelations making it appear as if the president was exaggerating the threat from Iraq, to say the least. Tenet, a loyal subject of the Bush administration, had no option but to come clean -- no matter how difficult a position it put the president in.
The CIA director's hands were tied on October 3 by Senator Graham, a democrat who represents Florida, when he told the CIA it was acting 'unacceptably', and added: 'We're trying to carry out a very important responsibility, and given the nature of this classified information, we are the only means by which the intelligence community can communicate to the legislative branch of government.'
There was no way that Tenet could play fast and loose with the Senate. Both the FBI and CIA have been attacked repeatedly in Congressional hearings since September 11 for a series of intelligence cock-ups.
Later on October 3, after Graham met with Tenet, his mood had changed -- Graham seemed to be cooler, calmer. He said the meeting had been frank and candid. What Graham wanted was a flavour of the classified National Intelligence Estimates, prepared by the National Intelligence Council, whose analysts report directly to Tenet. On Monday, October 7, around the time Bush was in Ohio cheerleading for war , Graham received just what he had been looking for -- it came in the shape of a letter from the CIA director. It made astonishing reading. Two days later, on Wednesday, October 9, the Senate intelligence committee voted to make the full text of Tenet's letter public.
Tenet's letter said he was declassifying selected material to help the Senate's deliberations on whether or not to support the president over attacking Iraq. 'Baghdad, for now, appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW (chemical and biological weapons) against the United States,' the declassified material read.
'Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means ... or CBW.
'Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the US would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.'
Tenet went on to declassify formerly secret evidence given at a closed hearing of the Senate's intelligence committee in which democrat Carl Levin, was told by a 'senior intelligence witness' that the 'probability ... would be low' of Saddam initiating a WMD attack. The agent also said the chances were 'pretty high' that Saddam would launch a WMD attack 'if we initiate an attack and he thought he was in extremis'. Tenet's revelations left the entire basis of Bush's call to arms in ruins, and the CIA director swiftly became an embarrassment to the president as the propaganda war backfired . Tenet was not deliberately trying to undermine Bush -- he was simply forced into a corner by the Senate and compelled to reveal his true understanding of the Iraqi crisis.
Kenneth M Pollack, who worked as a military analyst at the CIA before serving as a top aide on Persian Gulf affairs on President Clinton's National Security Council, said: 'The agency line is that it is basically unlikely that Iraq would give WMDs to terrorists under most circumstances. The Bush administration is trying to make the case that Iraq might try to give WMDs to al-Qaeda under certain circumstances. But what the agency is saying is that Saddam is likely to give such weapons to terrorists only under extreme circumstances when he believes he is likely to be toppled.'
The White House tried to put a different spin on the Tenet letter. Sean McCormack, the White House National Security Council spokesman, said the portions of the letter released by Graham gave a misleading impression of the CIA's overall conclusion. 'There were parts of the Tenet letter that weren't read in,' he said. Other parts were 'taken out of context', he said. However, Graham's spokesman, Paul Anderson, denied there had been any misquoting, and the full document, which the Senate committee has released, supports Anderson's line.
Lee Hamilton, the former chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, added pointedly: 'It's an overwhelming temptation to manipulate intelligence to serve policy and, to some extent, I think that's what's happening here with Iraq.'
Tenet did, however, leave the Bush conspiracists something to cling to. In his letter to Graham, he played up the alleged links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, saying: 'We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade.
Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression ... we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members ... we have credible reporting that al-Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq, who could help them acquire WMD capabilities ... Iraq has provided training to al-Qaeda members in areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.'
This was not a smoking gun, but it kept suspicions alive that Iraq might just pass terrorists WMDs any day now. Tenet's tentative connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda is a far cry from the findings of his counterparts in Europe. Try as it might, the UK has been unable to produce any evidence clearly linking Saddam to bin Laden, and the French have positively ruled out any connection. Jean-Louis Bruguire, France's leading terrorist investigator, says years of investigation into radical Islamic terror groups have not produced a trace of evidence linking them to Iraq.
Bruguire is an investigative magistrate empowered to view French domestic and foreign intelligence material. Much of the material he sees is passed on to the CIA and FBI by French intelligence. He says: 'We have not found any link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Not a trace. There is no foundation to our investigations for the information given by the Americans.'
The French believe the secular nature of Saddam's regime deters him from getting into bed with the likes of bin Laden. It also makes cosying up to Saddam an anathema to the fundamentalists of al-Qaeda. Despite the admissions in the Tenet letter, the Senate voted 77-23 in the early hours of last Friday morning to authorise Bush to use force against Iraq. Earlier, the House of Representatives had voted the same way by a margin of 296-133.
It seems that most of the Senate listened to the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's reply to claims that the White House was exaggerating the Iraqi threat.
'Each of us has a solemn responsibility,' he said, 'to do everything in our power to ensure that, when the history of this period is written, the books won't ask why we slept.'
The doubts of the intelligence community were washed away against such patriotic phrase-making. It should be noted, however, that a few senators listened to Tenet's admissions and voted 'no'. Among them was Senator Bob Graham.
Friday, October 11, 2002
CIA Feels Heat on Iraq Data
By GREG MILLER and BOB DROGIN
TIMES STAFF WRITERS
October 11 2002
WASHINGTON -- Senior Bush administration officials are pressuring CIA analysts to tailor their assessments of the Iraqi threat to help build a case against Saddam Hussein, intelligence and congressional sources said.
In what sources described as an escalating "war," top officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere have bombarded CIA analysts with criticism and calls for revisions on such key questions as whether Iraq has ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network, sources said.
The sources stressed that CIA analysts—who are supposed to be impartial—are fighting to resist the pressure. But they said analysts are increasingly resentful of what they perceive as efforts to contaminate the intelligence process.
"Analysts feel more politicized and more pushed than many of them can ever remember," said an intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"The guys at the Pentagon shriek on issues such as the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. There has been a lot of pressure to write on this constantly, and to not let it drop."
The pressure has intensified in the weeks leading up to this week's debate in Congress on a resolution granting President Bush permission to pursue a military invasion of Iraq.
Evidence of the differences between the agency and the White House surfaced publicly this week when CIA Director George J. Tenet sent a letter to lawmakers saying the Iraqi president is unlikely to strike the United States unless provoked.
That was at odds with statements from Bush and others that Iraq poses an immediate threat. In a speech Monday in Cincinnati, Bush said the danger that Iraq poses to the United States "is already significant, and it only grows worse with time."
Several lawmakers voiced frustration with the way intelligence is being used in the debate on Iraq.
"I am concerned about the politicization of intelligence," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who echoed complaints of other members that the administration has been selective in the intelligence it cites, overstating its case in many instances.
Classified material provided recently by the CIA on Iraq's capabilities and intentions "does not track some of the public statements made by senior administration officials," Feinstein said.
Outside experts say they too see growing cause for concern.
"The intelligence officials are responding to the political leadership, not the other way around, which is how it should be," said Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The politics are driving our intelligence assessments at this point."
Tenet rejected assertions that the agency is being unduly influenced.
"The president of the United States would never tolerate anything other than our most honest judgment," Tenet said in a statement late Thursday. "Our credibility and integrity are our most precious commodities. We will not let anyone tell us what conclusions to reach.
"Policymakers, members of Congress and others are free to push us to challenge our assertions and to ask tough, probing questions. This is healthy. But the notion that we would shape our assessments to please any one of our customers is abhorrent to the ethic by which we work and is simply untrue."
Unrelenting Pressure
But intelligence sources say the pressure on CIA analysts has been unrelenting in recent months, much of it coming from Iraq hawks including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his top deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz.
CIA officials who brief Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on Iraq routinely return to the agency with a long list of complaints and demands for new analysis or shifts in emphasis, sources said.
"There is a lot of unhappiness with the analysis," usually because it is seen as not hard-line enough, one intelligence official said.
Another government official said CIA briefers "are constantly sent back by the senior people at Defense and other places to get more, get more, get more to make their case."
A senior Pentagon official rejected claims that Rumsfeld would improperly influence intelligence analysts and said they might be misinterpreting remarks meant to test their convictions. "He's a guy who's constantly challenging assertions and assumptions," the official said.
But White House hawks have shown a tendency for stretching the case against Iraq. Wolfowitz and others have clung to claims that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague, the Czech capital, last year even though the CIA has viewed the report with deep skepticism.
Rumsfeld's recent remark that the United States has "bulletproof" evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Hussein struck many in the intelligence community as an exaggerated assessment of the available evidence.
Indeed, Tenet's letter to lawmakers this week said the agency's "understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability."
Similarly, Bush said in his Cincinnati speech, "We've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."
But Tenet's letter was more equivocal, saying only that there has been "reporting" that such training has taken place. Unlike other passages of the letter, he did not describe the reporting as "solid" or "credible."
The sequence of events surrounding the release of the letter is seen by many on Capitol Hill as an example of how the political winds have whipped intelligence on Iraq.
Tenet released the letter only after being pushed to do so by lawmakers unhappy with an earlier CIA report on Iraq that hewed closely to the White House line.
When lawmakers seized on the letter in speeches against the White House case for war, Tenet quickly issued another statement asserting that "there is no inconsistency" between White House and agency views on Iraq danger. A day later, Tenet rejected another request from lawmakers to declassify additional material on Iraq.
Tenet "is in a bad position," said one congressional aide. "He's under fire from the [intelligence] committees. Then he's under fire from the White House."
Some agency critics note that the CIA's public statements on Iraq have evolved over the last year, escalating their assessment of the risk posed by Hussein.
When Tenet testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 19, for example, the Iraqi threat was not singled out or described with particular urgency.
Hussein "may ... have retained the capability to deliver" biological or chemical weapons "using modified aircraft or other unmanned aerial vehicles," Tenet said, for example.
Tenet also told the committee at the time that Baghdad has "had contacts" with Al Qaeda and that tactical cooperation is "possible." His letter to lawmakers this week asserts "senior level contacts" going back a decade.
A senior U.S. intelligence official said some of the changes can be attributed to new information gained from interrogations of several Al Qaeda leaders captured in Pakistan and elsewhere since spring.
The official insisted that intelligence also supported Bush's widely challenged charge that Iraq is "exploring ways" of using drone aircraft to disperse chemical or biological agents against targets in the United States.
U.N. reports confirm that Iraq has converted Czech-made L-29 trainer jets into unmanned aircraft and that it has sought to equip them with sprayers, but such planes are incapable of flying long distances.
During his speech Tuesday on Iraq, Bush repeated a claim that Baghdad has attempted to import high-strength aluminum tubes "for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."
The claim, however, is widely disputed. A British government report last month, which reflects the judgments of British intelligence, notes that "no definitive intelligence" links the tubes to a nuclear program.
Old Accusations
Accusations that the CIA has shaded its analysis of sensitive national security issues to support administration policies are not new.
Ronald Reagan and other Republicans charged that the CIA under President Carter underestimated the Soviet threat in the late 1970s, leading to creation of a separate "Blue Team" panel that produced a more dire analysis of the data.
During the Clinton administration, hawkish Republicans charged that the intelligence community was downplaying the threat of ballistic missiles.
A commission led by Rumsfeld argued that the threat was much more immediate and thus sharpened the political debate over national missile defense.
TIMES STAFF WRITERS
October 11 2002
WASHINGTON -- Senior Bush administration officials are pressuring CIA analysts to tailor their assessments of the Iraqi threat to help build a case against Saddam Hussein, intelligence and congressional sources said.
In what sources described as an escalating "war," top officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere have bombarded CIA analysts with criticism and calls for revisions on such key questions as whether Iraq has ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network, sources said.
The sources stressed that CIA analysts—who are supposed to be impartial—are fighting to resist the pressure. But they said analysts are increasingly resentful of what they perceive as efforts to contaminate the intelligence process.
"Analysts feel more politicized and more pushed than many of them can ever remember," said an intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"The guys at the Pentagon shriek on issues such as the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. There has been a lot of pressure to write on this constantly, and to not let it drop."
The pressure has intensified in the weeks leading up to this week's debate in Congress on a resolution granting President Bush permission to pursue a military invasion of Iraq.
Evidence of the differences between the agency and the White House surfaced publicly this week when CIA Director George J. Tenet sent a letter to lawmakers saying the Iraqi president is unlikely to strike the United States unless provoked.
That was at odds with statements from Bush and others that Iraq poses an immediate threat. In a speech Monday in Cincinnati, Bush said the danger that Iraq poses to the United States "is already significant, and it only grows worse with time."
Several lawmakers voiced frustration with the way intelligence is being used in the debate on Iraq.
"I am concerned about the politicization of intelligence," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who echoed complaints of other members that the administration has been selective in the intelligence it cites, overstating its case in many instances.
Classified material provided recently by the CIA on Iraq's capabilities and intentions "does not track some of the public statements made by senior administration officials," Feinstein said.
Outside experts say they too see growing cause for concern.
"The intelligence officials are responding to the political leadership, not the other way around, which is how it should be," said Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The politics are driving our intelligence assessments at this point."
Tenet rejected assertions that the agency is being unduly influenced.
"The president of the United States would never tolerate anything other than our most honest judgment," Tenet said in a statement late Thursday. "Our credibility and integrity are our most precious commodities. We will not let anyone tell us what conclusions to reach.
"Policymakers, members of Congress and others are free to push us to challenge our assertions and to ask tough, probing questions. This is healthy. But the notion that we would shape our assessments to please any one of our customers is abhorrent to the ethic by which we work and is simply untrue."
Unrelenting Pressure
But intelligence sources say the pressure on CIA analysts has been unrelenting in recent months, much of it coming from Iraq hawks including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his top deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz.
CIA officials who brief Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on Iraq routinely return to the agency with a long list of complaints and demands for new analysis or shifts in emphasis, sources said.
"There is a lot of unhappiness with the analysis," usually because it is seen as not hard-line enough, one intelligence official said.
Another government official said CIA briefers "are constantly sent back by the senior people at Defense and other places to get more, get more, get more to make their case."
A senior Pentagon official rejected claims that Rumsfeld would improperly influence intelligence analysts and said they might be misinterpreting remarks meant to test their convictions. "He's a guy who's constantly challenging assertions and assumptions," the official said.
But White House hawks have shown a tendency for stretching the case against Iraq. Wolfowitz and others have clung to claims that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague, the Czech capital, last year even though the CIA has viewed the report with deep skepticism.
Rumsfeld's recent remark that the United States has "bulletproof" evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Hussein struck many in the intelligence community as an exaggerated assessment of the available evidence.
Indeed, Tenet's letter to lawmakers this week said the agency's "understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability."
Similarly, Bush said in his Cincinnati speech, "We've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."
But Tenet's letter was more equivocal, saying only that there has been "reporting" that such training has taken place. Unlike other passages of the letter, he did not describe the reporting as "solid" or "credible."
The sequence of events surrounding the release of the letter is seen by many on Capitol Hill as an example of how the political winds have whipped intelligence on Iraq.
Tenet released the letter only after being pushed to do so by lawmakers unhappy with an earlier CIA report on Iraq that hewed closely to the White House line.
When lawmakers seized on the letter in speeches against the White House case for war, Tenet quickly issued another statement asserting that "there is no inconsistency" between White House and agency views on Iraq danger. A day later, Tenet rejected another request from lawmakers to declassify additional material on Iraq.
Tenet "is in a bad position," said one congressional aide. "He's under fire from the [intelligence] committees. Then he's under fire from the White House."
Some agency critics note that the CIA's public statements on Iraq have evolved over the last year, escalating their assessment of the risk posed by Hussein.
When Tenet testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 19, for example, the Iraqi threat was not singled out or described with particular urgency.
Hussein "may ... have retained the capability to deliver" biological or chemical weapons "using modified aircraft or other unmanned aerial vehicles," Tenet said, for example.
Tenet also told the committee at the time that Baghdad has "had contacts" with Al Qaeda and that tactical cooperation is "possible." His letter to lawmakers this week asserts "senior level contacts" going back a decade.
A senior U.S. intelligence official said some of the changes can be attributed to new information gained from interrogations of several Al Qaeda leaders captured in Pakistan and elsewhere since spring.
The official insisted that intelligence also supported Bush's widely challenged charge that Iraq is "exploring ways" of using drone aircraft to disperse chemical or biological agents against targets in the United States.
U.N. reports confirm that Iraq has converted Czech-made L-29 trainer jets into unmanned aircraft and that it has sought to equip them with sprayers, but such planes are incapable of flying long distances.
During his speech Tuesday on Iraq, Bush repeated a claim that Baghdad has attempted to import high-strength aluminum tubes "for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."
The claim, however, is widely disputed. A British government report last month, which reflects the judgments of British intelligence, notes that "no definitive intelligence" links the tubes to a nuclear program.
Old Accusations
Accusations that the CIA has shaded its analysis of sensitive national security issues to support administration policies are not new.
Ronald Reagan and other Republicans charged that the CIA under President Carter underestimated the Soviet threat in the late 1970s, leading to creation of a separate "Blue Team" panel that produced a more dire analysis of the data.
During the Clinton administration, hawkish Republicans charged that the intelligence community was downplaying the threat of ballistic missiles.
A commission led by Rumsfeld argued that the threat was much more immediate and thus sharpened the political debate over national missile defense.
Thursday, October 10, 2002
CIA in blow to Bush attack plans
CIA in blow to Bush attack plans
Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday October 10, 2002
The Guardian
President George Bush's attempt to maintain public support for military action against Iraq has taken a fresh blow from an unexpected quarter, with the publication of a letter from the CIA stating that while Saddam Hussein poses little threat to America now, a US invasion could push him into retaliating with chemical or biological weapons.
The unusually detailed public statement, in the form of a letter from the CIA director, George Tenet, to Congress, comes at a highly sensitive moment, potentially damaging Mr Bush's attempt to rally an overwhelming congressional mandate for the use of force against Iraq.
In a chilling excerpt, Mr Tenet warned that if Saddam was personally threatened he might seize "his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him".
The risk of such an attack, possibly involving weapons of mass destruction, would rise from "low" to "pretty high" were Saddam to feel cornered by US military might.
Such a stark judgment seems likely to increase public anxiety about the prospect of a new war. There is still majority backing for military action, but that support appears to be fading despite a concerted public relations campaign by the administration to put its case.
Approval for military action has fallen from 57% last month to 53% this week, according to a US Gallup poll.
The CIA letter was seized on by Democrat opponents of military action, at the height of the congressional debate on a resolution authorising an invasion if and when the president deems it necessary.
Donald Payne, a House Democrat, said that Mr Tenet's letter showed that the Bush administration's aggressive strategy "could trigger the very things that our president has said that he is trying to prevent: the use of chemical or biological weapons. In view of this report, the policy of a pre-emptive strike is troublesome."
Mr Tenet's letter came in response to a congressional request to declassify segments of CIA briefings on Iraq over the past few days. He said: "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW [chemical and biological weapons] against the United States."
This assessment is reinforced by testimony given to Congress last week by an unnamed senior intelligence officer, which Mr Tenet allowed to be declassified.
The officer said: "My judgment would be that the probability of [Saddam] initiating an attack . . . in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now, the likelihood I think would be low."
Asked about the likelihood of an Iraqi chemical or biological attack on the US in response to an invasion, the intelligence officer said: "Pretty high, in my view."
Mr Tenet emphasised the same point in his own words. "Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions," he wrote.
He added that Saddam might work with Islamist terrorists to carry out an attack.
It is unusual for the CIA to put such details of its intelligence assessments into a public document. The letter was produced after intense pressure from senators.
The letter also comes at a time when the CIA is competing with the more hawkish Pentagon, which is also supplying the White House with intelligence on the Iraqi threat.
"You have to ask yourself the question, since Tenet is part of the team, why now?" said Fred Hitz, a former CIA inspector general. "You have to go back to the Vietnam era to find a time when the judgment of the intelligence community was in the public eye on such a current affairs basis."
The White House last night denied that the CIA analysis undermined Mr Bush's message on the urgency of confronting Baghdad.
Mr Tenet "did not say we're OK," the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said. "If Saddam Hussein holds a gun to someone's head, while he denies he even owns a gun, do you really want to take a chance that he'll never use it."
In a bid to dampen the controversy, Mr Tenet later put out a statement insisting: "There is no inconsistency between our view of Saddam's growing threat and the view as expressed in [Bush's] speech.
"Although we think the chances of Saddam initiating a WMD [weapons of mass destruction] attack at this moment are low, in part because it would constitute an admission that he possesses WMD, there is no question that the likelihood of Saddam using WMD against the US or our allies in the region for blackmail, deterrence or otherwise grows as his arsenal continues to build."
Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday October 10, 2002
The Guardian
President George Bush's attempt to maintain public support for military action against Iraq has taken a fresh blow from an unexpected quarter, with the publication of a letter from the CIA stating that while Saddam Hussein poses little threat to America now, a US invasion could push him into retaliating with chemical or biological weapons.
The unusually detailed public statement, in the form of a letter from the CIA director, George Tenet, to Congress, comes at a highly sensitive moment, potentially damaging Mr Bush's attempt to rally an overwhelming congressional mandate for the use of force against Iraq.
In a chilling excerpt, Mr Tenet warned that if Saddam was personally threatened he might seize "his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him".
The risk of such an attack, possibly involving weapons of mass destruction, would rise from "low" to "pretty high" were Saddam to feel cornered by US military might.
Such a stark judgment seems likely to increase public anxiety about the prospect of a new war. There is still majority backing for military action, but that support appears to be fading despite a concerted public relations campaign by the administration to put its case.
Approval for military action has fallen from 57% last month to 53% this week, according to a US Gallup poll.
The CIA letter was seized on by Democrat opponents of military action, at the height of the congressional debate on a resolution authorising an invasion if and when the president deems it necessary.
Donald Payne, a House Democrat, said that Mr Tenet's letter showed that the Bush administration's aggressive strategy "could trigger the very things that our president has said that he is trying to prevent: the use of chemical or biological weapons. In view of this report, the policy of a pre-emptive strike is troublesome."
Mr Tenet's letter came in response to a congressional request to declassify segments of CIA briefings on Iraq over the past few days. He said: "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW [chemical and biological weapons] against the United States."
This assessment is reinforced by testimony given to Congress last week by an unnamed senior intelligence officer, which Mr Tenet allowed to be declassified.
The officer said: "My judgment would be that the probability of [Saddam] initiating an attack . . . in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now, the likelihood I think would be low."
Asked about the likelihood of an Iraqi chemical or biological attack on the US in response to an invasion, the intelligence officer said: "Pretty high, in my view."
Mr Tenet emphasised the same point in his own words. "Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions," he wrote.
He added that Saddam might work with Islamist terrorists to carry out an attack.
It is unusual for the CIA to put such details of its intelligence assessments into a public document. The letter was produced after intense pressure from senators.
The letter also comes at a time when the CIA is competing with the more hawkish Pentagon, which is also supplying the White House with intelligence on the Iraqi threat.
"You have to ask yourself the question, since Tenet is part of the team, why now?" said Fred Hitz, a former CIA inspector general. "You have to go back to the Vietnam era to find a time when the judgment of the intelligence community was in the public eye on such a current affairs basis."
The White House last night denied that the CIA analysis undermined Mr Bush's message on the urgency of confronting Baghdad.
Mr Tenet "did not say we're OK," the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said. "If Saddam Hussein holds a gun to someone's head, while he denies he even owns a gun, do you really want to take a chance that he'll never use it."
In a bid to dampen the controversy, Mr Tenet later put out a statement insisting: "There is no inconsistency between our view of Saddam's growing threat and the view as expressed in [Bush's] speech.
"Although we think the chances of Saddam initiating a WMD [weapons of mass destruction] attack at this moment are low, in part because it would constitute an admission that he possesses WMD, there is no question that the likelihood of Saddam using WMD against the US or our allies in the region for blackmail, deterrence or otherwise grows as his arsenal continues to build."
CIA undermines propaganda war
BBC News
10 October 2002
CIA undermines propaganda war
Paul Reynolds
BBC News Online World Affairs correspondent
The CIA Director George Tenet has become the unlikely source of embarrassment to President George W Bush, undermining Mr Bush's warning of catastrophic threats from Saddam Hussein and exposing disagreements within the intelligence world about the nature of the danger.
In a letter to Congress, Mr Tenet said: "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or chemical and biological warfare against the United States."
Mr Tenet says that only if attacked would Iraq use whatever weapons of mass destruction it has.
George Bush said in his Cincinnati speech to the American people: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
Assessing intentions
A central issue here is one of assessing Iraq's intentions. Numerous reports over the past few months have detailed its capabilities, though even some of those are in dispute.
Think tanks have put out several summaries. The British Government added new detail with its own dossier. The CIA has this month joined in with a document of its own.
Mr Tenet's assessment, however, deals more with intentions than with hardware.
And it raises the question whether President Bush has been exaggerating the threat to justify military action.
The president has, for example, made much in his speech of the links that Saddam Hussein has had with "international terrorist groups" and that he and Osama Bin Laden "share a common enemy" (ie the United States).
He suggested that it was but a short step from there to providing such terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.
The three Ts
This is known as the threat of the "three Ts" - tyranny, terrorists and technology.
But experts say that Saddam Hussein comes from a different background to Bin Laden. Saddam is a secular revolutionary socialist dictator.
Donald Rumsfeld
His links with al-Qaeda are tenuous at best and do not seem to exist at senior level.
His support for Palestinian groups is well known and was probably what Mr Bush was referring to. Notorious figures like Abu Nidal (who died in Iraq recently) and Abu Abbas have been given shelter.
But there is no evidence that they would be given weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Bush also suggested that Iraq had developed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and that the United States was "concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAV's for missions targeting the United States".
It is known that Iraq is trying to turn a Czech made trainer the L29 into an UAV but it has a range of only 600 kilometres (370 miles). It could hit American bases in the Middle East but not the United States itself.
Propaganda war
In the propaganda war preceding military action, government are always prone to casting any threat in the most dramatic possible way.
And the Bush administration's reply to claims that it is exaggerating is simple - after 11 September, it cannot take a chance.
The Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has made warnings about Saddam Hussein into a speciality, said to the House Armed Service Committee on 18 September:
"We are on notice - each of us. Each of us has a solemn responsibility to do everything in our power to ensure that, when the history of this period is written, the books won't ask why we slept."
Against such rhetoric, the doubts of some in the intelligence community do not make much headway.
10 October 2002
CIA undermines propaganda war
Paul Reynolds
BBC News Online World Affairs correspondent
The CIA Director George Tenet has become the unlikely source of embarrassment to President George W Bush, undermining Mr Bush's warning of catastrophic threats from Saddam Hussein and exposing disagreements within the intelligence world about the nature of the danger.
In a letter to Congress, Mr Tenet said: "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or chemical and biological warfare against the United States."
Mr Tenet says that only if attacked would Iraq use whatever weapons of mass destruction it has.
George Bush said in his Cincinnati speech to the American people: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
Assessing intentions
A central issue here is one of assessing Iraq's intentions. Numerous reports over the past few months have detailed its capabilities, though even some of those are in dispute.
Think tanks have put out several summaries. The British Government added new detail with its own dossier. The CIA has this month joined in with a document of its own.
Mr Tenet's assessment, however, deals more with intentions than with hardware.
And it raises the question whether President Bush has been exaggerating the threat to justify military action.
The president has, for example, made much in his speech of the links that Saddam Hussein has had with "international terrorist groups" and that he and Osama Bin Laden "share a common enemy" (ie the United States).
He suggested that it was but a short step from there to providing such terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.
The three Ts
This is known as the threat of the "three Ts" - tyranny, terrorists and technology.
But experts say that Saddam Hussein comes from a different background to Bin Laden. Saddam is a secular revolutionary socialist dictator.
Donald Rumsfeld
His links with al-Qaeda are tenuous at best and do not seem to exist at senior level.
His support for Palestinian groups is well known and was probably what Mr Bush was referring to. Notorious figures like Abu Nidal (who died in Iraq recently) and Abu Abbas have been given shelter.
But there is no evidence that they would be given weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Bush also suggested that Iraq had developed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and that the United States was "concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAV's for missions targeting the United States".
It is known that Iraq is trying to turn a Czech made trainer the L29 into an UAV but it has a range of only 600 kilometres (370 miles). It could hit American bases in the Middle East but not the United States itself.
Propaganda war
In the propaganda war preceding military action, government are always prone to casting any threat in the most dramatic possible way.
And the Bush administration's reply to claims that it is exaggerating is simple - after 11 September, it cannot take a chance.
The Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has made warnings about Saddam Hussein into a speciality, said to the House Armed Service Committee on 18 September:
"We are on notice - each of us. Each of us has a solemn responsibility to do everything in our power to ensure that, when the history of this period is written, the books won't ask why we slept."
Against such rhetoric, the doubts of some in the intelligence community do not make much headway.
Ritter: It's important that the American people understand the sham that's being perpetrated
CNN CROSSFIRE
Aired October 10, 2002
Aired October 10, 2002
"I think it's important that the American people understand the sham that's being perpetrated by the president, by Congress right now."
- Scott Ritter, former Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector, Cpt. USMC
Wednesday, October 09, 2002
Bush's attacked by US intelligence
White House 'exaggerating Iraqi threat'
Bush's televised address attacked by US intelligence
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday October 9, 2002
The Guardian
President Bush's case against Saddam Hussein, outlined in a televised address to the nation on Monday night, relied on a slanted and sometimes entirely false reading of the available US intelligence, government officials and analysts claimed yesterday.
Officials in the CIA, FBI and energy department are being put under intense pressure to produce reports which back the administration's line, the Guardian has learned. In response, some are complying, some are resisting and some are choosing to remain silent.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence.
In his address, the president reassured Americans that military action was not "imminent or unavoidable", but he made the most detailed case to date for the use of force, should it become necessary.
But some of the key allegations against the Iraqi regime were not supported by intelligence currently available to the administration. Mr Bush repeated a claim already made by senior members of his administration that Iraq has attempted to import hardened aluminium tubes "for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons". The tubes were also mentioned by Tony Blair in his dossier of evidence presented to parliament last month.
However, US government experts on nuclear weapons and centrifuges have suggested that they were more likely to be used for making conventional weapons.
"I would just say there is not much support for that [nuclear] theory around here," said a department of energy specialist.
David Albright, a physicist and former UN weapons inspector who was consulted on the purpose of the aluminium tubes, said it was far from clear that the tubes were intended for a uranium centrifuge.
Mr Albright, who heads the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington thinktank, said: "There's a catfight going on about this right now. On one side you have most of the experts on gas centrifuges. On the other you have one guy sitting in the CIA."
Mr Albright said sceptics at the energy department's Lawrence Livermore national laboratory in California had been ordered to keep their doubts to themselves. He quoted a colleague at the laboratory as saying: "The administration can say what it wants and we are expected to remain silent."
There is already considerable scepticism among US intelligence officials about Mr Bush's claims of links between Iraq and al-Qaida. In his speech on Monday, Mr Bush referred to a "very senior al-Qaida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year".
An intelligence source said the man the president was referring to was Abu Musab Zarqawi, who was arrested in Jordan in 2001 for his part in the "millennium plot" to bomb tourist sites there. He was subsequently released and eventually made his way to Iraq in search of treatment. However, intercepted telephone calls did not mention any cooperation with the Iraqi government.
There is also profound scepticism among US intelligence experts about the president's claim that "Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases".
Bob Baer, a former CIA agent who tracked al-Qaida's rise, said that there were contacts between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqi government in Sudan in the early 1990s and in 1998: "But there is no evidence that a strategic partnership came out of it. I'm unaware of any evidence of Saddam pursuing terrorism against the United States."
A source familiar with the September 11 investigation said: "The FBI has been pounded on to make this link."
In making his case on Monday, Mr Bush made a startling claim that the Iraqi regime was developing drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which "could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas".
"We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States," he warned.
US military experts confirmed that Iraq had been converting eastern European trainer jets, known as L-29s, into drones, but said that with a maximum range of a few hundred miles they were no threat to targets in the US.
"It doesn't make any sense to me if he meant United States territory," said Stephen Baker, a retired US navy rear admiral who assesses Iraqi military capabilities at the Washington-based Centre for Defence Information.
Mr Cannistraro said the flow of intelligence to the top levels of the administration had been deliberately skewed by hawks at the Pentagon.
"CIA assessments are being put aside by the defence department in favour of intelligence they are getting from various Iraqi exiles," he said. "Machiavelli warned princes against listening to exiles. Well, that is what is happening now."
Bush's televised address attacked by US intelligence
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday October 9, 2002
The Guardian
President Bush's case against Saddam Hussein, outlined in a televised address to the nation on Monday night, relied on a slanted and sometimes entirely false reading of the available US intelligence, government officials and analysts claimed yesterday.
Officials in the CIA, FBI and energy department are being put under intense pressure to produce reports which back the administration's line, the Guardian has learned. In response, some are complying, some are resisting and some are choosing to remain silent.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence.
In his address, the president reassured Americans that military action was not "imminent or unavoidable", but he made the most detailed case to date for the use of force, should it become necessary.
But some of the key allegations against the Iraqi regime were not supported by intelligence currently available to the administration. Mr Bush repeated a claim already made by senior members of his administration that Iraq has attempted to import hardened aluminium tubes "for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons". The tubes were also mentioned by Tony Blair in his dossier of evidence presented to parliament last month.
However, US government experts on nuclear weapons and centrifuges have suggested that they were more likely to be used for making conventional weapons.
"I would just say there is not much support for that [nuclear] theory around here," said a department of energy specialist.
David Albright, a physicist and former UN weapons inspector who was consulted on the purpose of the aluminium tubes, said it was far from clear that the tubes were intended for a uranium centrifuge.
Mr Albright, who heads the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington thinktank, said: "There's a catfight going on about this right now. On one side you have most of the experts on gas centrifuges. On the other you have one guy sitting in the CIA."
Mr Albright said sceptics at the energy department's Lawrence Livermore national laboratory in California had been ordered to keep their doubts to themselves. He quoted a colleague at the laboratory as saying: "The administration can say what it wants and we are expected to remain silent."
There is already considerable scepticism among US intelligence officials about Mr Bush's claims of links between Iraq and al-Qaida. In his speech on Monday, Mr Bush referred to a "very senior al-Qaida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year".
An intelligence source said the man the president was referring to was Abu Musab Zarqawi, who was arrested in Jordan in 2001 for his part in the "millennium plot" to bomb tourist sites there. He was subsequently released and eventually made his way to Iraq in search of treatment. However, intercepted telephone calls did not mention any cooperation with the Iraqi government.
There is also profound scepticism among US intelligence experts about the president's claim that "Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases".
Bob Baer, a former CIA agent who tracked al-Qaida's rise, said that there were contacts between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqi government in Sudan in the early 1990s and in 1998: "But there is no evidence that a strategic partnership came out of it. I'm unaware of any evidence of Saddam pursuing terrorism against the United States."
A source familiar with the September 11 investigation said: "The FBI has been pounded on to make this link."
In making his case on Monday, Mr Bush made a startling claim that the Iraqi regime was developing drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which "could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas".
"We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States," he warned.
US military experts confirmed that Iraq had been converting eastern European trainer jets, known as L-29s, into drones, but said that with a maximum range of a few hundred miles they were no threat to targets in the US.
"It doesn't make any sense to me if he meant United States territory," said Stephen Baker, a retired US navy rear admiral who assesses Iraqi military capabilities at the Washington-based Centre for Defence Information.
Mr Cannistraro said the flow of intelligence to the top levels of the administration had been deliberately skewed by hawks at the Pentagon.
"CIA assessments are being put aside by the defence department in favour of intelligence they are getting from various Iraqi exiles," he said. "Machiavelli warned princes against listening to exiles. Well, that is what is happening now."
Tuesday, October 08, 2002
Some administration officials expressing misgivings on Iraq
Some administration officials expressing misgivings on Iraq
By WARREN P. STROBEL and JONATHAN S. LANDAY
Knight-Ridder Tribune News
WASHINGTON -- While President Bush marshals congressional and international support for invading Iraq, a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war.
These officials charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses -- including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network -- have overstated the amount of international support for attacking Iraq and have downplayed the potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East.
They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.
"Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A dozen other officials echoed his views in interviews.
No one who was interviewed disagreed.
They cited recent suggestions by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that Saddam and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network are working together.
Rumsfeld said on Sept. 26 that the U.S. government has "bulletproof" confirmation of links between Iraq and al-Qaida members, including "solid evidence" that members of the terrorist network maintain a presence in Iraq.
The facts are much less conclusive. Officials said Rumsfeld's statement was based in part on intercepted telephone calls, in which an al-Qaida member who apparently was passing through Baghdad was overheard calling friends or relatives, intelligence officials said. The intercepts provide no evidence that the suspected terrorist was working with the Iraqi regime or that he was working on a terrorist operation while he was in Iraq, they said.
Rumsfeld also suggested that the Iraqi regime has offered safe haven to bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
While technically true, that also is misleading. Intelligence reports said the Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, a longtime Iraqi intelligence officer, made the offer during a visit to Afghanistan in late 1998, after the United States attacked al-Qaida training camps with cruise missiles to retaliate for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But officials said the same intelligence reports said bin Laden rejected the offer because he didn't want Saddam to control his group.
In fact, the officials said, there's no ironclad evidence that the Iraqi regime and the terrorist network are working together or that Saddam has ever contemplated giving chemical or biological weapons to al-Qaida, with whom he has deep ideological differences.
None of the dissenting officials, who work in a number of different agencies, would agree to speak publicly, out of fear of retribution. But many of them have long experience in the Middle East and South Asia, and all spoke in similar terms about their unease with the way U.S. political leaders are dealing with Iraq.
All agreed that Saddam is a threat who eventually must be dealt with, and none flatly opposes military action. But, they say, the U.S. government has no dramatic new knowledge about the Iraqi leader that justifies Bush's urgent call to arms.
"I've seen nothing that's compelling," said one military officer who has access to intelligence reports.
Some lawmakers have voiced similar concerns after receiving CIA briefings.
By WARREN P. STROBEL and JONATHAN S. LANDAY
Knight-Ridder Tribune News
WASHINGTON -- While President Bush marshals congressional and international support for invading Iraq, a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war.
These officials charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses -- including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network -- have overstated the amount of international support for attacking Iraq and have downplayed the potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East.
They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.
"Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A dozen other officials echoed his views in interviews.
No one who was interviewed disagreed.
They cited recent suggestions by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that Saddam and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network are working together.
Rumsfeld said on Sept. 26 that the U.S. government has "bulletproof" confirmation of links between Iraq and al-Qaida members, including "solid evidence" that members of the terrorist network maintain a presence in Iraq.
The facts are much less conclusive. Officials said Rumsfeld's statement was based in part on intercepted telephone calls, in which an al-Qaida member who apparently was passing through Baghdad was overheard calling friends or relatives, intelligence officials said. The intercepts provide no evidence that the suspected terrorist was working with the Iraqi regime or that he was working on a terrorist operation while he was in Iraq, they said.
Rumsfeld also suggested that the Iraqi regime has offered safe haven to bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
While technically true, that also is misleading. Intelligence reports said the Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, a longtime Iraqi intelligence officer, made the offer during a visit to Afghanistan in late 1998, after the United States attacked al-Qaida training camps with cruise missiles to retaliate for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But officials said the same intelligence reports said bin Laden rejected the offer because he didn't want Saddam to control his group.
In fact, the officials said, there's no ironclad evidence that the Iraqi regime and the terrorist network are working together or that Saddam has ever contemplated giving chemical or biological weapons to al-Qaida, with whom he has deep ideological differences.
None of the dissenting officials, who work in a number of different agencies, would agree to speak publicly, out of fear of retribution. But many of them have long experience in the Middle East and South Asia, and all spoke in similar terms about their unease with the way U.S. political leaders are dealing with Iraq.
All agreed that Saddam is a threat who eventually must be dealt with, and none flatly opposes military action. But, they say, the U.S. government has no dramatic new knowledge about the Iraqi leader that justifies Bush's urgent call to arms.
"I've seen nothing that's compelling," said one military officer who has access to intelligence reports.
Some lawmakers have voiced similar concerns after receiving CIA briefings.
Friday, October 04, 2002
CIA report reveals analysts' split over extent of Iraqi nuclear threat
Knight Ridder Newspapers
CIA report reveals analysts' split over extent of Iraqi nuclear threat
By Jonathan S. Landay
Fri, Oct. 04, 2002
WASHINGTON - The CIA released a new report Friday on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that added little to earlier appraisals but exposed a sharp dispute among U.S. intelligence experts over Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program.
The dispute centers on thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes that Iraq allegedly has tried to purchase from foreign suppliers. According to the CIA report, most intelligence experts believe the tubes were to be made into casings for centrifuges that could be used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
But the CIA report notes that some intelligence analysts disagree, arguing that the tubes probably were intended to make conventional weapons, the report said.
Despite the conflicting opinions, President Bush has publicly asserted that the tubes were intended for use in making a nuclear weapon. Speaking on Sept. 12 to the United Nations General Assembly, Bush flatly said the tubes were to be "used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon."
A White House report released in conjunction with Bush's speech repeated that unconditional assertion. "Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium," the report said.
That speech and report marked the start of Bush's aggressive effort to drum up support in Congress and the United Nations for military action if Saddam continued to defy U.N. efforts to discover and destroy his weapons of mass destruction.
Several senior administration and intelligence officials, all of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity, charged that the decision to publicize one analysis of the aluminum tubes and ignore the contrary one is typical of the way the administration has been handling intelligence about Iraq.
The White House and the Pentagon, these officials said, are pressuring intelligence analysts to highlight information that supports Bush's Iraq policy and suppress information and analysis that might undercut congressional, public or international support for war.
Some U.S. intelligence and military experts dispute the administration's suggestion that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose an imminent threat to the United States. One senior military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the threat has not increased appreciably beyond what it was when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Iraq does have considerable experience with high-speed centrifuges. U.N. inspectors discovered after the 1991 Persian Gulf War that Iraqi scientists, with illicit assistance from German experts, had succeeded in constructing large networks of centrifuges for enriching uranium.
But the administration's assertions about the aluminum tubes provoked considerable debate among nuclear weapons experts. One who reviewed a government analysis of the tubes said he did not believe they were intended for use in Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons program.
"From what I've seen, this is not conclusive evidence," said the expert, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. He said that the tubes were not suitable for manufacturing into high-speed enrichment centrifuges because their diameters were too small and the aluminum they were made from was too hard.
"It seems to me that the tubes are clearly dual-use, and therefore you cannot conclude they were for uranium enrichment," he said.
David Albright, a physicist and former U.N. weapons inspector, disputed the CIA's assertion that a majority of analysts believe the tubes were intended to help make nuclear weapons.
Albright, the director of the Institute for Science and International Security, a non-partisan think tank, said he has been told that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and other U.S. nuclear weapons facilities disagreed with that assessment but have been ordered not to say anything.
He quoted one scientist as saying that "the administration can say what it wants and we are expected to remain silent."
The publication of the CIA report came as the Bush administration continued pressing its efforts to win resolutions from the Senate and the U.N. Security Council authorizing military force.
The 27-page document said Iraq has large stocks of chemical weapons, has accelerated its efforts to produce biological weapons, including anthrax, and has manufactured missiles capable of hitting targets beyond the 93-mile range permitted by the United Nations.
The report also said that it could take Iraq until the last half of the decade to produce a nuclear weapon if it has to produce its own bomb-grade uranium or plutonium. But if it obtained such materials on the international black market, Iraq could have a nuclear weapon within a year, the report said.
Iraq denies having any weapons of mass destruction.
CIA report reveals analysts' split over extent of Iraqi nuclear threat
By Jonathan S. Landay
Fri, Oct. 04, 2002
WASHINGTON - The CIA released a new report Friday on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that added little to earlier appraisals but exposed a sharp dispute among U.S. intelligence experts over Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program.
The dispute centers on thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes that Iraq allegedly has tried to purchase from foreign suppliers. According to the CIA report, most intelligence experts believe the tubes were to be made into casings for centrifuges that could be used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
But the CIA report notes that some intelligence analysts disagree, arguing that the tubes probably were intended to make conventional weapons, the report said.
Despite the conflicting opinions, President Bush has publicly asserted that the tubes were intended for use in making a nuclear weapon. Speaking on Sept. 12 to the United Nations General Assembly, Bush flatly said the tubes were to be "used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon."
A White House report released in conjunction with Bush's speech repeated that unconditional assertion. "Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium," the report said.
That speech and report marked the start of Bush's aggressive effort to drum up support in Congress and the United Nations for military action if Saddam continued to defy U.N. efforts to discover and destroy his weapons of mass destruction.
Several senior administration and intelligence officials, all of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity, charged that the decision to publicize one analysis of the aluminum tubes and ignore the contrary one is typical of the way the administration has been handling intelligence about Iraq.
The White House and the Pentagon, these officials said, are pressuring intelligence analysts to highlight information that supports Bush's Iraq policy and suppress information and analysis that might undercut congressional, public or international support for war.
Some U.S. intelligence and military experts dispute the administration's suggestion that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose an imminent threat to the United States. One senior military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the threat has not increased appreciably beyond what it was when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Iraq does have considerable experience with high-speed centrifuges. U.N. inspectors discovered after the 1991 Persian Gulf War that Iraqi scientists, with illicit assistance from German experts, had succeeded in constructing large networks of centrifuges for enriching uranium.
But the administration's assertions about the aluminum tubes provoked considerable debate among nuclear weapons experts. One who reviewed a government analysis of the tubes said he did not believe they were intended for use in Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons program.
"From what I've seen, this is not conclusive evidence," said the expert, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. He said that the tubes were not suitable for manufacturing into high-speed enrichment centrifuges because their diameters were too small and the aluminum they were made from was too hard.
"It seems to me that the tubes are clearly dual-use, and therefore you cannot conclude they were for uranium enrichment," he said.
David Albright, a physicist and former U.N. weapons inspector, disputed the CIA's assertion that a majority of analysts believe the tubes were intended to help make nuclear weapons.
Albright, the director of the Institute for Science and International Security, a non-partisan think tank, said he has been told that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and other U.S. nuclear weapons facilities disagreed with that assessment but have been ordered not to say anything.
He quoted one scientist as saying that "the administration can say what it wants and we are expected to remain silent."
The publication of the CIA report came as the Bush administration continued pressing its efforts to win resolutions from the Senate and the U.N. Security Council authorizing military force.
The 27-page document said Iraq has large stocks of chemical weapons, has accelerated its efforts to produce biological weapons, including anthrax, and has manufactured missiles capable of hitting targets beyond the 93-mile range permitted by the United Nations.
The report also said that it could take Iraq until the last half of the decade to produce a nuclear weapon if it has to produce its own bomb-grade uranium or plutonium. But if it obtained such materials on the international black market, Iraq could have a nuclear weapon within a year, the report said.
Iraq denies having any weapons of mass destruction.
Wednesday, October 02, 2002
JOINT RESOLUTION TO AUTHORIZE THE USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release October 2, 2002
________________________________________________________________________
JOINT RESOLUTION TO AUTHORIZE THE USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED
FORCES AGAINST IRAQ
Whereas in 1990 in response to Iraq 's war of aggression against and illegal occupation of Kuwait, the United States forged a coalition of nations to liberate Kuwait and its people in order to defend the national security of the United States and enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions relating to Iraq;
Whereas after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq entered into a United Nations sponsored cease-fire agreement pursuant to which Iraq unequivocally agreed, among other things, to eliminate its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs and the means to deliver and develop them, and to end its support for international terrorism;
Whereas the efforts of international weapons inspectors, United States intelligence agencies, and Iraqi defectors led to the discovery that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and a large scale biological weapons program, and that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program that was much closer to producing a nuclear weapon than intelligence reporting had previously indicated;
Whereas Iraq, in direct and flagrant violation of the cease-fire, attempted to thwart the efforts of weapons inspectors to identify and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and development capabilities, which finally resulted in the withdrawal of inspectors from Iraq on October 31, 1998;
Whereas in 1998 Congress concluded that Iraq's continuing weapons of mass destruction programs threatened vital United States interests and international peace and security, declared Iraq to be in "material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations" and urged the President "to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations" (Public Law 105-235);
Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations;
Whereas Iraq persists in violating resolutions of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population thereby Threatening international peace and security in the region, by refusing to release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq, including an American serviceman, and by failing to return property wrongfully seized by Iraq from Kuwait;
Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people; Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its continuing hostility toward, and willingness to attack, the United States, including by attempting in 1993 to assassinate former President Bush and by firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council;
Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq; Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of American citizens;
Whereas the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001 underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations;
Whereas Iraq's demonstrated capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its Armed Forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so, and the extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the United States and its citizens from such an attack, combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself;
Whereas United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 authorizes the use of all Necessary means to enforce United Nations Security Council Resolution 660 and subsequent relevant resolutions and to compel Iraq to cease certain activities that threaten international peace and security, including the development of weapons of mass destruction and refusal or obstruction of United Nations weapons inspections in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687, repression of its civilian population in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688, and threatening its neighbors or United Nations operations in Iraq in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 949;
Whereas Congress in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1) has authorized the President "to use United States Armed Forces pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) in order to achieve implementation of Security Council Resolutions 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674, and 677";
Whereas in December 1991, Congress expressed its sense that it "supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 as being consistent with the Authorization of Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1)," that Iraq's repression of its civilian population violates United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 and "constitutes a continuing threat to the peace, security, and stability of the Persian Gulf region," and that Congress, "supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688";
Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act (Public Law 105-338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime;
Whereas on September 12, 2002, President Bush committed the United States to "work with the United Nations Security Council to meet our common challenge" posed by Iraq and to "work for the necessary resolutions," while also making clear that "the Security Council resolutions will be enforced, and the just demands of peace and security will be met, or action will be unavoidable";
Whereas the United States is determined to prosecute the war on terrorism and Iraq's ongoing support for international terrorist groups combined with its development of weapons of mass destruction in direct violation of its obligations under the 1991 ceasefire and other United Nations Security Council resolutions make clear that it is in the national security interests of the United States and in furtherance of the war on terrorism that all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions be enforced, including through the use of force if necessary;
Whereas Congress has taken steps to pursue vigorously the war on terrorism through the provision of authorities and funding requested by the President to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such persons or organizations;
Whereas the President and Congress are determined to continue to take all appropriate actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;
Whereas the President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States, as Congress recognized in the joint resolution on Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40); and
Whereas it is in the national security of the United States to restore international peace and security to the Persian Gulf region;
Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SEC. 1. SHORT TITLE.
SEC. 2. SUPPORT FOR UNITED STATES DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS
The Congress of the United States supports the efforts by the President to
SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
SEC. 4. REPORTS TO CONGRESS
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release October 2, 2002
________________________________________________________________________
JOINT RESOLUTION TO AUTHORIZE THE USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED
FORCES AGAINST IRAQ
Whereas in 1990 in response to Iraq 's war of aggression against and illegal occupation of Kuwait, the United States forged a coalition of nations to liberate Kuwait and its people in order to defend the national security of the United States and enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions relating to Iraq;
Whereas after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq entered into a United Nations sponsored cease-fire agreement pursuant to which Iraq unequivocally agreed, among other things, to eliminate its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs and the means to deliver and develop them, and to end its support for international terrorism;
Whereas the efforts of international weapons inspectors, United States intelligence agencies, and Iraqi defectors led to the discovery that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and a large scale biological weapons program, and that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program that was much closer to producing a nuclear weapon than intelligence reporting had previously indicated;
Whereas Iraq, in direct and flagrant violation of the cease-fire, attempted to thwart the efforts of weapons inspectors to identify and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and development capabilities, which finally resulted in the withdrawal of inspectors from Iraq on October 31, 1998;
Whereas in 1998 Congress concluded that Iraq's continuing weapons of mass destruction programs threatened vital United States interests and international peace and security, declared Iraq to be in "material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations" and urged the President "to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations" (Public Law 105-235);
Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations;
Whereas Iraq persists in violating resolutions of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population thereby Threatening international peace and security in the region, by refusing to release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq, including an American serviceman, and by failing to return property wrongfully seized by Iraq from Kuwait;
Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people; Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its continuing hostility toward, and willingness to attack, the United States, including by attempting in 1993 to assassinate former President Bush and by firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council;
Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq; Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of American citizens;
Whereas the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001 underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations;
Whereas Iraq's demonstrated capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its Armed Forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so, and the extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the United States and its citizens from such an attack, combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself;
Whereas United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 authorizes the use of all Necessary means to enforce United Nations Security Council Resolution 660 and subsequent relevant resolutions and to compel Iraq to cease certain activities that threaten international peace and security, including the development of weapons of mass destruction and refusal or obstruction of United Nations weapons inspections in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687, repression of its civilian population in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688, and threatening its neighbors or United Nations operations in Iraq in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 949;
Whereas Congress in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1) has authorized the President "to use United States Armed Forces pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) in order to achieve implementation of Security Council Resolutions 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674, and 677";
Whereas in December 1991, Congress expressed its sense that it "supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 as being consistent with the Authorization of Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1)," that Iraq's repression of its civilian population violates United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 and "constitutes a continuing threat to the peace, security, and stability of the Persian Gulf region," and that Congress, "supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688";
Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act (Public Law 105-338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime;
Whereas on September 12, 2002, President Bush committed the United States to "work with the United Nations Security Council to meet our common challenge" posed by Iraq and to "work for the necessary resolutions," while also making clear that "the Security Council resolutions will be enforced, and the just demands of peace and security will be met, or action will be unavoidable";
Whereas the United States is determined to prosecute the war on terrorism and Iraq's ongoing support for international terrorist groups combined with its development of weapons of mass destruction in direct violation of its obligations under the 1991 ceasefire and other United Nations Security Council resolutions make clear that it is in the national security interests of the United States and in furtherance of the war on terrorism that all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions be enforced, including through the use of force if necessary;
Whereas Congress has taken steps to pursue vigorously the war on terrorism through the provision of authorities and funding requested by the President to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such persons or organizations;
Whereas the President and Congress are determined to continue to take all appropriate actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;
Whereas the President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States, as Congress recognized in the joint resolution on Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40); and
Whereas it is in the national security of the United States to restore international peace and security to the Persian Gulf region;
Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SEC. 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the "Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq".
SEC. 2. SUPPORT FOR UNITED STATES DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS
The Congress of the United States supports the efforts by the President to
(a) strictly enforce through the United Nations Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions applicable to Iraq and encourages him in those efforts; and
(b) obtain prompt and decisive action by the Security Council to ensure that Iraq abandons its strategy of delay, evasion and noncompliance and promptly and strictly complies with all relevant Security Council resolutions.
SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION.
The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq.
(b) PRESIDENTIAL DETERMINATION.
In connection with the exercise of the authority granted in subsection (a) to use force the President shall, prior to such exercise or as soon there after as may be feasible, but no later than 48 hours after exercising such authority, make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either(A)will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq or
(B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security
Council resolutions regarding Iraq, and
(2) acting pursuant to this resolution is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorists attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
(c) WAR POWERS RESOLUTION REQUIREMENTS.(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION. Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.
(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS. Nothing in this resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.
SEC. 4. REPORTS TO CONGRESS
(a) The President shall, at least once every 60 days, submit to the Congress a report on matters relevant to this joint resolution, including actions taken pursuant to the exercise of authority granted in section 2 and the status of planning for efforts that are expected to be required after such actions are completed, including those actions described in section 7 of Public Law 105-338 (the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998).
(b) To the extent that the submission of any report described in subsection (a)coincides with the submission of any other report on matters relevant to this joint resolution otherwise required to be submitted to Congress pursuant to the reporting requirements of Public Law 93-148 (the War Powers Resolution), all such reports may be submitted as a single consolidated report to the Congress.
(c) To the extent that the information required by section 3 of Public Law 102-1 is included in the report required by this section, such report shall be considered as meeting the requirements of section 3 of Public Law 102-1.
Tuesday, October 01, 2002
Iraq Agrees to Allow UN Inspectors Back
Iraq Agrees to Allow UN Inspectors Back
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1, 2002 – Iraq has agreed to allow U.N. inspectors back into the country, U.N. officials said Oct. 1 in Vienna.
Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, said Iraq had agreed to allow inspectors in under the rules in existence in 1998, when the inspectors were ordered out.
U.S. officials are taking a wait-and-see attitude on the situation. A State Department spokesman said U.S. officials must "read the fine print" on the agreement before commenting. Early reports indicate that the inspectors would not be allowed into presidential palaces the United States suspects of being repositories or laboratories for chemical, nuclear and biological weapons.
Defense Department officials also said it was too early to comment.
It is unclear if this agreement will allow for unannounced inspections "anytime, anyplace," which the Bush administration has demanded, State Department officials said.
U.N. officials said the first group of inspectors could be in Baghdad in two weeks.
But the rules may change for the inspectors. The U.N. Security Council is debating a U.S.-sponsored resolution demanding that Iraq live by the agreements it has signed since the end of the Persian Gulf War. Among these are eliminating weapons of mass destruction, stopping threats to its neighbors and stopping persecuting its people.
The United States wants any new Security Council resolution to have more teeth and a listing of consequences if Iraq doesn't comply.
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1, 2002 – Iraq has agreed to allow U.N. inspectors back into the country, U.N. officials said Oct. 1 in Vienna.
Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, said Iraq had agreed to allow inspectors in under the rules in existence in 1998, when the inspectors were ordered out.
U.S. officials are taking a wait-and-see attitude on the situation. A State Department spokesman said U.S. officials must "read the fine print" on the agreement before commenting. Early reports indicate that the inspectors would not be allowed into presidential palaces the United States suspects of being repositories or laboratories for chemical, nuclear and biological weapons.
Defense Department officials also said it was too early to comment.
It is unclear if this agreement will allow for unannounced inspections "anytime, anyplace," which the Bush administration has demanded, State Department officials said.
U.N. officials said the first group of inspectors could be in Baghdad in two weeks.
But the rules may change for the inspectors. The U.N. Security Council is debating a U.S.-sponsored resolution demanding that Iraq live by the agreements it has signed since the end of the Persian Gulf War. Among these are eliminating weapons of mass destruction, stopping threats to its neighbors and stopping persecuting its people.
The United States wants any new Security Council resolution to have more teeth and a listing of consequences if Iraq doesn't comply.
All articles in this archive are used under "fair use" as they are important to the national discussion of whether or not the people of this country are being deceived by their government. These articles are used as evidence in that discussion.
