Just Think - News Archive

Contaiment Was Working
CIA: Seven Months Before 9/11, the Agency Said Iraq Posed No Threat to the US
By JASON LEOPOLD
June 27, 2003

Seven months before two-dozen or so al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes and flew three of the aircrafts directly into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, killing 3,000 innocent civilians, CIA Director George Tenet, testified before Congress that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United States or to other countries in the Middle East.

But immediately after the terrorist attacks on 9-11, which the Bush administration claims Iraq is partially responsible for, the President and his advisers were already making a case for war against Iraq without so much as providing a shred of evidence to back up the allegations that Iraq and its former President, Saddam Hussein, was aware of the attacks or helped the al-Qaida hijackers plan the catastrophe.

It was then, after the 9-11 attacks, that intelligence reports from the CIA radically changed from previous months, which said Iraq posed no immediate threat to the U.S., to now show Iraq had a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and was in hot pursuit of a nuclear bomb. The Bush administration seized upon the reports to build public support for the war and used the information to eventually justify a preemptive strike against the country in March even though much of the information in the CIA report has since been disputed.

In just seven short months, beginning as early as February 2001, Bush administration officials said Iraq went from being a threat only to its own people to posing an imminent threat to the world. Indeed, in a Feb. 12, 2001 interview with the Fox News Channel Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said: "Iraq is probably not a nuclear threat at the present time."

But Rumsfeld testified before the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 18, 2002 that Iraq is close to acquiring the materials needed to build a nuclear bomb.

"Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent -- that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons," Rumsfeld testified before the committee.

"I would not be so certain... He has, at this moment, stockpiles chemical and biological weapons, and is pursuing nuclear weapons."

Rumsfeld never offered any evidence to support his claims, but his dire warnings of a nuclear catastrophe caused by Saddam Hussein was enough to convince most lawmakers, both Democrat and Republican, that Saddam's Iraq was doomed. Shortly after his remarks before the House Armed Services Committee, Congress passed a resolution authorizing President Bush to use "all appropriate means" to remove Saddam from power.

Two months have passed since the U.S. invaded Iraq and not a spec of anthrax nor any other deadly chemical or biological weapon has been found. U.S. military forces have searched more than 300 sites but have turned up nothing substantial. Lawmakers are now questioning whether the intelligence information gathered by the CIA was accurate or whether the Bush administration manipulated and or exaggerated the intelligence to make a case for war.

However, intelligence reports released by the CIA and more than 100 interviews top officials in the Bush administration, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, gave to various Senate and Congressional committees and media outlets prior to 9-11 show that the U.S. never believed Saddam Hussein to be an imminent threat other than to his own people. Moreover, the CIA reported in February 2001 that Iraq was "probably" pursuing chemical and biological weapons programs but that it had no direct evidence that Iraq actually had actually obtained such weapons.

"We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since (Operation) Desert Fox to reconstitute its WMD programs, although given its past behavior, this type of activity must be regarded as likely," CIA director Tenet said in an agency report to Congress on Feb 7, 2001 .

"We assess that since the suspension of (United Nations) inspections in December of 1998, Baghdad has had the capability to reinitiate both its (chemical and biological weapons) programs... without an inspection monitoring program, however, it is more difficult to determine if Iraq has done so."

"Moreover, the automated video monitoring systems installed by the UN at known and suspect WMD facilities in Iraq are still not operating," according to the 2001 CIA report. "Having lost this on-the-ground access, it is more difficult for the UN or the US to accurately assess the current state of Iraq's WMD programs."

Ironically, in the February 2001 report, Tenet said Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network remain the single greatest threat to U.S. interests here and abroad. Tenet eerily describes in the report a scenario that six months later would become a reality.

"Terrorists are also becoming more operationally adept and more technically sophisticated in order to defeat counter-terrorism measures. For example, as we have increased security around government and military facilities, terrorists are seeking out "softer" targets that provide opportunities for mass casualties. Employing increasingly advanced devices and using strategies such as simultaneous attacks, the number of people killed ... Usama bin Ladin and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat. Since 1998, Bin Ladin has declared all U.S. citizens legitimate targets of attack. As shown by the bombing of our embassies in Africa in 1998 and his Millennium plots last year, he is capable of planning multiple attacks with little or no warning," Tenet said.

However, Tenet only briefly discussed the al-Qaida threat and devoted the bulk of his testimony on how to deal with the threat of rogue countries such as North Korea, Syria, Iran and Iraq. Six months later, Bin Laden was identified as the mastermind behind 9-11.

Between 1998 and early 2002, the CIA's reports on the so-called terror threat offered no details on what types of chemical and biological weapons that Iraq obtained.

But that changed dramatically in October 2002 when the CIA issued another report that this time included details of Iraq's alleged vast chemical and biological weapons.

The October 2002 CIA report into Iraq's WMD identifies sarin, mustard gas, VX and numerous other chemical weapons that the CIA claims Iraq had been stockpiling over the years, in stark contrast to earlier reports by Tenet that said the agency had no evidence to support such claims. And unlike testimony Tenet gave a year earlier, in which he said the CIA had no direct evidence of Iraq's WMD programs, the intelligence information in the 2002 report, Tenet said, is rock solid.

"This information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence," Tenet said during a CIA briefing in February.

"It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

The CIA would not comment on the differing reports between 2001 and 2002 or how the agency was able to obtain such intelligence information and corroborate it so quickly.

Still, in early 2001, while hardliners in the Bush administration were privately discussing ways to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Secretary of State Powell said the U.S. successfully "contained" Iraq in the years since the first Gulf War and that because of economic sanctions placed on the country Iraq was unable to obtain WMD.

"We have been able to keep weapons from going into Iraq," Powell said during a Feb 11, 2001 interview with "Face the Nation. "We have been able to keep the sanctions in place to the extent that items that might support weapons of mass destruction development have had some controls on them... it's been quite a success for ten years..."

Moreover, during a meeting with Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, in February 2001 on how to deal with Iraq, Powell said the U.N., the U.S. and its allies "have succeeded in containing Saddam Hussein and his ambitions."

Saddam's "forces are about one-third their original size. They don't really possess the capability to attack their neighbors the way they did ten years ago," Powell said during the meeting with Fischer.

"Containment has been a successful policy, and I think we should make sure that we continue it until such time as Saddam Hussein comes into compliance with the agreements he made at the end of the (Gulf) war."

Powell added that Iraq is "not threatening America," but in a separate interview with ABC's Sam Donaldson on Feb. 1, 2001, Powell said the U.S. could attack Iraq if "something occurred to us," which would suggest that the 9-11 terrorist attacks made Iraq a legitimate target.

NY Times
FOREIGN DESK | June 25, 2003, Wednesday

AFTER THE WAR: INTELLIGENCE; Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence

By JAMES RISEN AND DOUGLAS JEHL (NYT) words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 11 , Column 1

A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said

Ex-CIA director says administration stretched facts on Iraq
By John Diamond, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Former CIA director Stansfield Turner accused the Bush administration Tuesday of "overstretching the facts" about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in making its case for invading that country.
Turner's broadside adds the retired admiral's name to a list of former intelligence professionals concerned that the CIA and its intelligence reports were manipulated to justify the war. Since Baghdad fell April 9, U.S. forces have been unable to find chemical and biological weapons the White House said were in Iraq.

Turner, who headed the CIA under President Carter, paused for a long moment when asked by reporters whether current CIA Director George Tenet should resign. "That's a tough one," Turner said. The problem did not appear to lie with the CIA, he said, but Tenet should consider resigning if he lost the confidence of President Bush or the American people. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

Turner suggested Tenet should tread cautiously because CIA directors "can be made the fall guy" by administrations when policy judgments based on intelligence go wrong.

Turner said, "There is no question in my mind (policymakers) distorted the situation, either because they had bad intelligence or because they misinterpreted it."

Public criticism of an administration's handling of intelligence is rare from former CIA directors, who typically give the benefit of the doubt to those with full access to classified information.

President Bush has given no indication he is having second thoughts about his decision to invade Iraq.

"We made it clear to the dictator of Iraq that he must disarm," Bush said in a speech Tuesday at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale. "He chose not to do so, so we disarmed him. And I know there's a lot of revisionist history now going on, but one thing is certain. He is no longer a threat to the free world."

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was known to have chemical and biological weapons in the early and mid-1990s. Late last year, Iraq claimed to have none left, though it offered no proof of having disposed of them. At the White House, spokesman Ari Fleischer called it "fanciful" and "a fit of imagination" to believe that Saddam would have destroyed his arsenal but neglected to tell the world. Seeking to counter partisan criticism about the intelligence used to justify war, Fleischer said Democrats, including President Clinton, flatly asserted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the late 1990s.

"The president has every confidence in the intelligence and that weapons will be found," Fleischer said. "The president has full faith in Director Tenet."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been battling similar criticism about alleged misuse of intelligence. Robin Cook, who resigned from Blair's Cabinet on the eve of the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, said Tuesday that searchers in Iraq had found no sign either of equipment or a workforce for making weapons of mass destruction.

"It is inconceivable that both could have been kept concealed for the two months we have been in occupation of Iraq," Cook told a parliamentary inquiry into Iraq intelligence matters.

Turner's comments come a month after a group of retired U.S. intelligence officers wrote President Bush to "express deep concern" over alleged misuse of intelligence to justify the war.

Contributing: Richard Benedetto and wire reports

Iraqi mobile labs nothing to do with germ warfare, report finds

Peter Beaumont, Antony Barnett and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday June 15, 2003
The Observer

An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.
The conclusion by biological weapons experts working for the British Government is an embarrassment for the Prime Minister, who has claimed that the discovery of the labs proved that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction and justified the case for going to war against Saddam Hussein.

Instead, a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.'

The conclusion of the investigation ordered by the British Government - and revealed by The Observer last week - is hugely embarrassing for Blair, who had used the discovery of the alleged mobile labs as part of his efforts to silence criticism over the failure of Britain and the US to find any weapons of mass destruction since the invasion of Iraq.

The row is expected to be re-ignited this week with Robin Cook and Clare Short, the two Cabinet Ministers who resigned over the war, both due to give evidence to a House of Commons inquiry into whether intelligence was manipulated in the run-up to the war. It will be the first time that both have been grilled by their peers on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee over what the Cabinet was told in the run-up to the war.

MPs will be keen to explore Cook's explanation when he resigned that, while he believed Iraq did have some WMD capability, he did not believe it was weaponised.

The Prime Minister and his director of strategy and communications, Alastair Campbell, are expected to decline invitations to appear. While MPs could attempt to force them, this is now thought unlikely to happen.

The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, is expected to give evidence the week after.

The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control.

Truth and Consequences
By Bruce B. Auster, Mark Mazzetti and Edward T. Pound
US News and World Report
June 9, 2003

On the evening of February 1, two dozen American officials gathered in a spacious conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. The time had come to make the public case for war against Iraq. For six hours that Saturday, the men and women of the Bush administration argued about what Secretary of State Colin Powell should--and should not--say at the United Nations Security Council four days later. Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein's misdeeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. "I'm not reading this," he declared. "This is bulls- - -." Just how good was America's intelligence on Iraq? Seven weeks after the end of the war, no hard evidence has been turned up on the ground to support the charge that Iraq posed an imminent threat to U.S. national security--no chemical weapons in the field, no Scud missiles in the western desert, no biological agents. At least not yet. As a result, questions are being raised about whether the Bush administration overstated the case against Saddam Hussein. History shows that the Iraqi regime used weapons of mass terror against Iraqi Kurds and during the war against Iran in the 1980s. But it now appears that American intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs was sometimes sketchy, occasionally politicized, and frequently the subject of passionate disputes inside the government. Today, the CIA is conducting a review of its prewar intelligence, at the request of the House Intelligence Committee, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has conceded that Iraq may have destroyed its chemical weapons months before the war.

The dossier. The question remains: What did the Bush administration know-- or think it knew--on the eve of war? In the six days before Powell went to the U.N., an intense, closed-door battle raged over the U.S. intelligence dossier that had been compiled on Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction and its links to terrorists. Holed up at the CIA night and day, a team of officials vetted volumes of intelligence purporting to show that Iraq posed a grave threat. Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, were among those who participated in some sessions. What follows is an account of the struggle to find common ground on a bill of particulars against Saddam. Interviews with more than a dozen officials reveal that many pieces of intelligence--including information the administration had already cited publicly--did not stand up to scrutiny and had to be dropped from the text of Powell's U.N. speech.

Vice President Cheney's office played a major role in the secret debates and pressed for the toughest critique of Saddam's regime, administration officials say. The first draft of Powell's speech was written by Cheney's staff and the National Security Council. Days before the team first gathered at the CIA, a group of officials assembled in the White House Situation Room to hear Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, lay out an indictment of the Iraqi regime--"a Chinese menu" of charges, one participant recalls, that Powell might use in his U.N. speech. Not everyone in the administration was impressed, however. "It was over the top and ran the gamut from al Qaeda to human rights to weapons of mass destruction," says a senior official. "They were unsubstantiated assertions, in my view." Powell, apparently, agreed. So one week before he was to address the U.N. Security Council, he created a team, which set up shop at the CIA, and directed it to provide him with an intelligence report based on more solid information. "Powell was acutely aware of the need to be completely accurate," says the senior official, "and that our national reputation was on the line."

The team, at first, tried to follow a 45-page White House script, taken from Libby's earlier presentation. But there were too many problems--some assertions, for instance, were not supported by solid or adequate sourcing, several officials say. Indeed, some of the damning information simply could not be proved. One example, included in the script, focused on intelligence indicating that an Iraqi official had approved the acquisition of sensitive software from an Australian company. The concern was that the software would allow the regime to understand the topography of the United States. That knowledge, coupled with unmanned aerial vehicles, might one day enable Iraq to attack America with biological or chemical weapons. That was the allegation. Tenet had briefed Cheney and others. Cheney, says a senior official, embraced the intelligence.

The White House instructed Powell to include the charge in his presentation. When the Powell team at the CIA examined the matter, however, it became clear that the information was not ironclad. CIA analysts, it turns out, couldn't determine after further review whether the software had, in fact, been delivered to Iraq or whether the Iraqis intended to use it for nefarious purposes. One senior official, briefed on the allegation, says the software wasn't sophisticated enough to pose a threat to the United States. Powell omitted the allegation from his U.N. speech. It had taken just one day for the team assembled at the CIA to trip over the fault line dividing the Bush administration. For months, the vice president's office and the Pentagon had been more aggressive than either State or the CIA when it came to making the case against Iraq.

Veteran intelligence officers were dismayed. "The policy decisions weren't matching the reports we were reading every day," says an intelligence official. In September 2002, U.S. News has learned, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons. It concluded: "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons . . . ." At about the same time, Rumsfeld told Congress that Saddam's "regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas." Rumsfeld's critics say that the secretary tended to assert things as fact even when intelligence was murky. "What we have here is advocacy, not intelligence work," says Patrick Lang, a former top DIA and CIA analyst on Iraq. "I don't think [administration officials] were lying; I just think they did a poor job. It's not the intelligence community. It's these guys in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who were playing the intelligence community." Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's top policy adviser, defended the intelligence analysis used in making the case for war and says it was inevitable that the "least developed" intelligence would be dropped from Powell's speech. "With intelligence, you get a snippet of information here, a glimpse of something there," he said. "It is inherently sketchy in most cases."

In a written statement provided to U.S. News, the CIA's Tenet says: "Our role is to call it like we see it--to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and what we base it on. . . . The integrity of our process was maintained throughout, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong." In those first days of February, the disputed material was put under the microscope. The marathon meetings, which included five rehearsals of the Powell presentation, lasted six days. According to a senior official, Powell would read an item. Then he would ask CIA officers there--including Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin--for the source of the information. "The secretary of state insisted that every piece of evidence be solid. Some others felt you could put circumstantial evidence in, and what matters is the totality of it," says one participant. "So you had material that ended up on the cutting-room floor."

And plenty was cut. Sometimes it was because information wasn't credible, sometimes because Powell didn't want his speech to get too long, sometimes because Tenet insisted on protecting sources and methods. At the last minute, for instance, the officials agreed to drop an electronic intercept of Iraqis describing the torture of a donkey. On the tape, the men laughed as they described what happened when a drop of a lethal substance touched the animal's skin. Thin gruel. The back and forth between the team at the CIA and the White House intensified. The script from the White House was whittled down, then discarded. Finally, according to several participants, the National Security Council offered up three more papers: one on Iraq's ties to terrorism, one on weapons of mass destruction, one on human-rights violations. The document on terrorism was 38 pages, double spaced. By the time the team at the CIA was done with it, half a dozen pages remained. Powell was so unimpressed with the information on al Qaeda that he decided to bury it at the end of his speech, according to officials. Even so, NSC officials kept pushing for Powell to include the charge that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. He refused.

By Monday night, February 3, the presentation was taking final shape. Powell wanted no doubts that the CIA stood behind the intelligence, so, according to one official, he told Tenet: "George, you're coming with me." On Tuesday, some members of the team decamped to New York, where Powell took a room at the Waldorf-Astoria. Participants ran two full dress rehearsals complete with place cards indicating where other members of the Security Council would be sitting. The next morning, Powell delivered his speech, as scheduled. Tenet was sitting right behind him. Today, the mystery is what happened to Iraq's terror weapons. "Everyone believed they would find it," says a senior official. "I have never seen intelligence agencies in this government and other governments so united on one subject."

Mirages. Were they right? Powell and Tenet were convinced that chemical agents had been deployed to field units. None have been found. War planners used the intelligence when targeting suspected weapons of mass destruction sites. Yet bomb-damage assessments found that none of the targets contained chemical or biological weapons. "What we don't know at this point," says an Air Force war planner, "is what was bad intelligence, what was bad timing, what was bad luck." As for the al Qaeda tie, defense officials told U.S. News last week they had learned of a potentially significant link between Saddam's regime and Osama bin Laden's organization. A captured senior member of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, has told interrogators about meetings between Iraqi intelligence officials and top members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group that merged with al Qaeda in the 1990s. The prisoner also described $300,000 in Iraqi transfers to the organization to pay for attacks in Egypt. The transfers were said to have been authorized by Saddam Hussein. "It's a single-source report," says one defense official. "But is this the first time anyone has told us something like this? Yeah."

Senior administration of-ficials say they remain convinced that weapons of mass destruction will turn up. The CIA and the Pentagon reported last week that two trucks seized in Iraq were apparently used as mobile biological weapons labs, though no biological agents were found. A senior counterterrorism official says the administration also believes that biological and chemical weapons have been hidden in vast underground complexes. "You can find it out in the open, but if you put this stuff underground or underwater," he says, "there is no signature and it doesn't show up." He added that the Pentagon is using small robots, outfitted with sensors and night-vision equipment, to get into and explore "heavily booby-trapped" underground complexes, some larger than football fields. "People are getting discouraged that they haven't found it," he says. "They are looking for a master source, a person who can say where the stuff is located." Some 300 sites have been inspected so far; there are an additional 600 to go, and the list is growing, as captured Iraqis provide new leads. But what if those leads turn up nothing? "It would be," says a senior administration official, "a colossal intelligence failure."

Nearly one in five children of active-duty U.S. military families won't benefit from the increased tax credit signed last week by President Bush because their parents earn too little to qualify - USAToday Jun 4,2003

It is offensive to say to the people of this Nation that we can afford to give huge tax credits to millionaires, but cannot come up with a few hundred dollars to help low-income military families who have sacrificed so much and need this money the most. - House Debate Jun 4, 2003

Study: Military kids slighted on tax credit
By William M. Welch, USA TODAY
6/4/2003

WASHINGTON — Nearly one in five children of active-duty U.S. military families won't benefit from the increased tax credit signed last week by President Bush because their parents earn too little to qualify, a study being released Thursday concludes.
The finding by the Children's Defense Fund, a liberal advocacy group, comes as Bush and Republican congressional leaders are under increasing fire for agreeing to omit working poor families from the increased child credit included in the $350 billion, 10-year tax cut plan and aid for states.

Those military families would have received a check of up to $400 per child under a provision that the Senate added to the bill. But that "refundable" credit to families who pay little or no federal income tax, but do pay payroll taxes, was deleted in final negotiations between Bush and Republican leaders of Congress.

Families who have children and earn more than about $27,000 a year are due to receive checks next month of up to $400 per child, as an advance on an increase in the credit from $600 to $1,000.

The group said 250,000 of the 1.4 million children in active-duty military families will not qualify for the benefit because of the omission.

Another 750,000 children denied the benefit have parents who are military veterans, the fund concluded. It based its findings on latest U.S. Census data.

Democrats, liberal groups and some moderate Republicans in Congress are trying to build pressure on Bush and GOP leaders to pass legislation quickly extending the credit to those families that were left out.

Democrats immediately invoked U.S. troops still in Iraq as a political justification for another bill expanding the credit.

"Thousands of military personnel, people who put their lives on the line for our country, won't receive the child credit unless we correct the bill," Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said.

The $3.5 billion cost would be paid for by cracking down on business tax avoidance schemes under the Democrats' proposal. They said fast action was needed to assure 12 million low-income families are able to receive a check when the government begins mailing them to more affluent families starting July 1.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., were negotiating a possible agreement that would permit the Senate to vote, perhaps this week, on competing proposals aimed at providing just such a remedy to the working poor. House Republican leaders are resisting the move.

They say Bush didn't propose giving the added credit to the working poor as part of his original economic stimulus plan, and that sending tax refunds to people who pay no federal income tax may be bad policy.

"This is something that has been blown out of proportion," said Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. "It was not part of the original bill, nor was it part of the bill in the House. ... We never debated it. ... It is a new idea, and it is one we ought to think about."

In another effort to build pressure, a coalition of liberal groups today begins airing TV ads in Washington blasting Bush for leaving the working poor out of the child credit benefit increase.

The Center for Community Change is buying a relatively modest amount of airtime, but it is encouraging hundreds of like-minded groups to air the same ad in other cities.

The ad shows two children: one too poor to qualify for the increased credit and another, whose parents make more money, who receives it. "President Bush chose the most fortunate to get the most," an announcer says."

Powell's doubts over CIA intelligence on Iraq prompted him to set up secret review

Specialists removed questionable evidence about weapons from draft of secretary of state's speech to UN

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday June 2, 2003
The Guardian

Fresh evidence emerged last night that Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was so disturbed about questionable American intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that he assembled a secret team to review the information he was given before he made a crucial speech to the UN security council on February 5.
Mr Powell conducted a full-dress rehearsal of the speech on the eve of the session at his suite in the Waldorf Astoria, his New York base when he is on UN business, according to the authoritative US News and World Report.

Much of the initial information for Mr Powell's speech to the UN was provided by the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, set up a special unit, the Office of Special Plans, to counter the uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.

Mr Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, US News and World Report says today. At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.

Presented with a script for his speech, Mr Powell suspected that Washington hawks were "cherry picking", the US magazine Newsweek also reports today. Greg Theilmann, a recently retired state department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, says that inside the Bush administration "there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused".

The Bush administration, under increased scrutiny for failing to find Saddam Hussein's arsenals eight weeks after occupying Baghdad, yesterday confronted the damaging new allegations on the misuse of intelligence to bolster the case for war.

The gaps in the case against Saddam have become a matter for public debate only within the last few days. They have also become an issue of credibility for the CIA and the Bush administration as it begins to assemble a case against Iran and its nuclear programme.

Yesterday, a senior Bush administration official told reporters travelling with the president to the Evian summit that Washington was not alone in its pursuit of Saddam's arsenal.

"We have to remember that there's a long history of accusation of the weapons of mass destruction programmes in Iraq. A lot of what is unresolved about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programme comes from the United Nations, from Unscom, from Unmovic [teams of weapons inspectors] and, of course, from US and other intelligence," the official said.

The official also said that US forces in Iraq had not yet had the time to process the hundreds of documents captured since Saddam's fall, or track down the people with information on his weapons programmes.

On Friday, the CIA director, George Tenet, was forced to issue a statement denying the agency doctored intelligence reports.

"Our role is to call it like we see it, to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and what we base it on. That's the code we live by," the statement said.

During a series of meetings at CIA headquarters last February, initiated by Mr Powell, the secretary of state was reported to have reviewed the intelligence reports on Saddam, his arsenal of chemical and nuclear weapons, and his possible links with al-Qaida. The ostensible purpose of the exercise, carried out over four days, was to decide which should be included in his address.

However, a common theme of the meetings was the failure of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to produce a convincing case against Saddam. Despite the increasingly belligerent statements from the administration's hawks, the CIA had disturbingly little proof.

Even more damaging, many of the assertions bandied about were based on reports that were speculative or impossible to corroborate - but seized on because they suited the agenda of the hawks in the administration. Ambiguities and nuance were left aside.

One claim from the original dossier that could not be proved involved the supply of sensitive software from Australia that would have allowed Baghdad to gather sensitive information about the topography of the US. However, the CIA could not establish for Mr Powell whether the software had been delivered to Iraq.

Although the issue of flawed CIA intelligence has caused concern about the agency's ability to gather evidence on potential threats to the US, it did not appear to have shaken the widespread belief that the war on Iraq was a just war.

"The day that I saw those nine and 10- year-old boys released from a prison, the day I saw the mass graves uncovered, it was ample testimony of the brutality and repressiveness of this regime," the Republican senator John McCain told ABC television yesterday. "It was the day that I believe our liberation of Iraq was fully vindicated."