WASHINGTON — In a forceful defense of the quality of prewar intelligence, CIA Director George Tenet on Thursday asserted that his analysts never claimed Iraq had been an "imminent" threat, as the Bush administration declared as it prepared for war last year.
While acknowledging the United States has yet to find any weapons of mass destruction inside Iraq, Tenet said he disagreed with his recently departed chief weapons hunter, David Kay, that the search was nearly over and no stockpiles would be found.
"No one told us what to say or how to say it," Tenet said. "When the facts of Iraq are all in, we will neither be completely right nor completely wrong."
Tenet also insisted that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had the "intent" and "intended" to produce nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
The televised morning speech from Georgetown University was billed by a Tenet aide as an effort "to set the record straight" after weeks of criticism from members of Congress and even some administration officials that the intelligence leading up to war had been flawed. The CIA and Congress are reviewing that intelligence and President Bush has agreed to appoint an independent commission to look into the matter. Bush is expected to name Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to the commission.
Bush, in South Carolina Thursday, defended his decision to go to war. "Knowing what I knew then, and knowing what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq," he said.
In his speech, Tenet focused on the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq’s weapons programs, a classified report to policy-makers that summarized the intelligence community’s assessments. He conceded that the estimate concluded that Iraq had some weapons of mass destruction inventories. But, he added, the analysts "differed on several important aspects of these programs and those debates were spelled out" in the report. He added that the analysts "never said there was an ‘imminent’ threat" from Iraq.
In the months before the war, however, administration officials, including Bush, argued forcefully that Iraq was an imminent threat and that waiting could be perilous.
On Sept. 13, 2002, Bush warned that Hussein was "a threat that we must deal with as quickly as possible." And on Oct. 2 of that year he said the Iraqi "regime is a threat of unique urgency." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Sept. 18, 2002, told the House that Iraq posed an "immediate threat from biological weapons" and the next day told the Senate that "no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people" than Iraq.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, with Tenet sitting next to him, told the United Nations a year ago Thursday that Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons were "real and present dangers" to the world.
Tenet admitted that U.S. intelligence agencies "did not have enough of our own human intelligence" inside Iraq after United Nations inspectors left in 1998, and that the agents were unable to "penetrate the inner sanctum" of Iraq’s weapons programs.
But concluding, as many critics have, that this failure reflected a shortage of agents and case officers around the world was "simply wrong," he said.
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