Posted on 07/05/2004 7:54:11 PM PDT by quidnunc
The Central Intelligence Agency was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the C.I.A. failed to give that information to President Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials.
The existence of a secret prewar C.I.A. operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists — and the agency's failure to give their statements to the president and other policymakers — has been uncovered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The panel has been investigating the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons and plans to release a wide-ranging report this week on the first phase of its inquiry. The report is expected to contain a scathing indictment of the C.I.A. and its leaders for failing to recognize that the evidence they had collected did not justify their assessment that Mr. Hussein had illicit weapons.
C.I.A. officials, saying that only a handful of relatives made claims that the weapons programs were dead, play down the significance of the information collected in the secret debriefing operation. That operation is one of a number of significant disclosures by the Senate investigation. The Senate report, intelligence officials say, concludes that the agency and the rest of the intelligence community did a poor job of collecting information about the status of Iraq's weapons programs, and that analysts at the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies did an even worse job of writing reports that accurately reflected the information they had.
Among the many problems that contributed to the committee's harsh assessment of the C.I.A.'s prewar performance were instances in which analysts may have misrepresented information, writing reports that distorted evidence in order to bolster their case that Iraq did have chemical, biological and nuclear programs, according to government officials. The Senate found, for example, that an Iraqi defector who supposedly provided evidence of the existence of a biological weapons program had actually said he did not know of any such program.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Who cares what the "relatives" say one way or the other? I wouldn't even believe the scientists one way or the other.
Did not read the whole article...seemed like the same ole liberal press garbage. So someone tell me...did they get this stuff from unnamed "govt. officials"?
And, before they printed this, did they bother to look at Dufler's recent findings that show that saddam could have popped out weapons in very short notice?
I'll modify what I said - I wouldn't take anyone's word on it just because they say "yes" or "no" - without further explanation and proof.
One could argue that the CIA is being made the fall guy. However, it seems to be a semantic or process like criticism - that it didn't "justify their assessment" - not that they were totally wrong or not.
Since the writer is James Risen of the famous hoax that Havel denied an Atta meeting in Prague anything possible. But it seems here he's just reporting on something that's printed in a report.
This doesn't alter the fact that Saddam breached his final UN Resolution warning of "serious consequences" if he did not allow weapons inspectors to VERIFY that he had dismantled his WMD programme.
The CIA seems to have slipped up in the intelligence gathering but intelligence is only as good as the quality of informants and it would not have been a good security move to simply take them at their word.
UN inspectors were required to account for what Saddam had done with his WMDs and to verify that they were destroyed.
Taking the word of a few Iraqi scientists speaking to CIA spooks was not good enough for global security.
Only five more days until George Tenet finally steps down on Sunday, and thank God.
I don't think that's the point. The interesting part (if it's true, of course) is that the CIA didn't pass this information on to Pres. Bush. I bet that, in contrast, similar quality information that tended to strengthen claims of Iraqi WMD development was sent on to the President.
This is consistent with the theory that Bush was set up.
Actually, this article is consistent with the infamous memo outlining how the dims were going to politicize the intelligence committee's work.
Well, the Democrats are certainly making untoward use of this stuff, but I don't think that the original source of the conflict is partisan politics.
If these programs had been abandonded, then why have so many Iraqi scientists who worked on Saddam's WMD programs been killed since the invasion? And did that story merit prominent coverage by the NY Times? [snicker]
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