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Posted on 02/05/2004 1:01:12 PM PST by harpu
(AP) CIA Director Geprge Tenet speaks at Georgetown Univeristy in Washington Thursday, Feb. 5, 2004.
WASHINGTON (AP) - In his first public defense of prewar intelligence, CIA Director George Tenet said Thursday that U.S. analysts had never claimed Iraq was an imminent threat, the main argument used by President Bush for going to war. [Bush actually said; we need to take out the Iraqi criminal (Hussein) BEFORE he becomes an imminent threat.]
Tenet said analysts had varying opinions on the state of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and those differences were spelled out in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate given to the White House. That report summarized intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs.
Analysts "painted an objective assessment for our policy makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests, " he said in a speech at Georgetown University.
"No one told us what to say or how to say it," Tenet said.
In the months before the war, Bush and his top aides repeatedly stressed the urgency of stopping Saddam Hussein. In a Sept. 12 speech to the United Nations, he called Saddam's regime "a grave and gathering danger." The next day, he told reporters that Saddam was "a threat that we must deal with as quickly as possible."
In an Oct. 7, 2002, speech in Ohio, Bush said "the danger is already significant and it only grows worse with time."
Tenet said U.S. intelligence accurately reported that Saddam's regime posed a danger. Though no weapons of mass destruction have been uncovered in Iraq, he said the search isn't over.
"We are nowhere near 85 percent finished," he said, in a direct rebuttal to statements made by his former chief adviser on Iraq's weapons, David Kay.
Since Kay resigned two weeks ago, his statements that Saddam's purported weapons didn't exist at the time of the U.S. invasion have sparked an intense debate over the prewar intelligence the Bush administration used to justify the war.
On Thursday, Bush repeated that "America confronted a gathering threat in Iraq. The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was one of the most brutal, corrupt and dangerous regimes in the world. For years the dictator funded terrorists, and gave reward money for suicide bombings."
Speaking in Charleston, S.C., Bush said Saddam is today "sitting in a prison cell, and he will be sitting in a courtroom to answer for his crimes." But, he conceded, "As the chief weapons inspector has said, we have not yet found the weapons we thought were there." Bush added that inspectors have found possible evidence of weapons programs.
"Knowing what I knew then and knowing what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq," he said, in a line that drew long applause from Bush's audience of military personnel and cadets.
Tenet spoke hours before the Senate Intelligence Committee was to begin a closed-door review of a draft report critical of prewar intelligence. It also came a day before Bush was expected to name a commission to examine intelligence problems.
Tenet outlined the sources of the CIA's prewar estimates, saying they were based on years of U.N. weapons inspections. Once the inspectors left in the late 1990s, it was based mostly on informants - some he acknowledged as suspect - and on technical intelligence.
He acknowledged that many of the agency's weapons of mass destruction prewar estimates have not been borne out so far. For example, U.S. analysts believed that Saddam's regime was trying to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program but have found no evidence of that, he said.
On chemical and biological weapons, Tenet said analysts believed that Saddam had ongoing programs and perhaps stockpiles and have found no evidence of such ongoing programs. He asserted, however, that the weapons searching teams needed more time.
Two sources with high-level access to Saddam's regime told the CIA in the fall of 2002, shortly before the war, that production of biological and chemical weapons was ongoing, Tenet said.
Those sources "solidified and reinforced ... my own view of the danger posed by Saddam's regime," Tenet said, taking direct responsibility for what was passed on to Bush.
On one key point that is befuddling weapons inspectors, Tenet said he did not know at this point whether it was possible Saddam's own officials had lied to the Iraqi leader about what his regime had in the way of weapons.
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction is turning into a major political issue ahead of the presidential election, calling into question the justification for the war as U.S. casualties mount. Republicans in Congress have increasingly been blaming poor intelligence and Tenet, who was appointed by President Clinton.
Democrats have said intelligence agencies deserved only part of the blame and have accused the White House of showcasing intelligence that bolstered the case for war, while ignoring dissenting opinions.
Even as Tenet acknowledged some intelligence shortcomings in Iraq, he listed other work that he said represented great successes. He credited U.S. intelligence on Iran and Libya's nuclear programs with recent decisions by those countries to cooperate with international arms inspectors.
Tenet credited CIA spies with the arrests of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, purported mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and Asia's leading terror suspect, Hambali.
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