Posted on 03/10/2004 5:56:27 PM PST by blam
CIA 'corrected' Cheney's allegations on Iraq
By David Rennie in Washington
(Filed: 11/03/2004)
George Tenet, the Central Intelligence Agency chief, has cautioned Vice-President Dick Cheney about apparently overblown statements on Iraq and plans to do so again, he has revealed.
Under fierce questioning from Democrats in the Senate, Mr Tenet said some of the most alarming allegations made by Mr Cheney and other administration leaders before and after the war did not reflect the consensus view of the intelligence community. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee of three occasions on which he had privately intervened to correct President George W Bush and Mr Cheney, or would be doing so.
"When I believed that someone was misconstruing intelligence I said something about it," said Mr Tenet, a Clinton appointment many Republicans believe should take the lion's share of the blame for faulty pre-war intelligence. He gave, as an example, the 2002 State of the Union address in which Mr Bush cited British fears that Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain uranium from Africa. He had "intervened" after that speech to object to the uranium claim.
Mr Tenet said he had called Mr Cheney after a January radio interview in which the vice-president claimed that the discovery of two lorry trailers, thought by some to be mobile biological weapons, offered "conclusive" proof that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction programmes. Mr Tenet said he had told Mr Cheney there was "no consensus in our intelligence community" about the true purpose of the trailers.
At least one more correction call lay ahead of Mr Tenet, he revealed, concerning a highly disputed memorandum claiming to prove collaboration between Saddam's regime and al-Qa'eda, sent to the Senate by a senior Pentagon official, Douglas Feith.
Mr Tenet said his agency "did not agree with the way the data was characterised" in Mr Feith's memorandum, which was leaked later to a conservative news magazine, The Weekly Standard.
Yet in a January newspaper interview Mr Cheney praised the article and recommended Mr Feith's memorandum as "your best source of information" on links between Iraq and al-Qa'eda.
Mr Tenet said he had only learned of Mr Cheney's January interview this week. "I will talk to him about it," he vowed.
Asked by Senator Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, if he believed the Bush administration had distorted information to justify the Iraq war, he replied: "No, Sir, I don't."
The exchanges shone a harsh light once more on the unique role played by Mr Cheney, the most powerful hawk in the Bush administration.
Before the war he went further in public than other senior figures in his claims on Iraq. In August 2002 he said Saddam had a nuclear capability that could directly threaten "anyone he chooses, in his own region, or beyond". In March last year, six days before the US-led invasion, Mr Cheney said: "We believe Iraq has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
Since the war he has advanced theories and claims that other members of the administration have abandoned, ranging from the disputed mobile weapons laboratories to the purported meeting in Prague between an Iraqi intelligence agent and the September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta.
Hmmm, hadn't thought of that.
The "public" intelligence community is a sham. Real intelligence comes from other sources lead by DIA, who don't share with the State Department leaning CIA. I'll ride with the Dickster before that blob Tenent. What a token dork he is.
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