WASHINGTON — CIA director George Tenet said Tuesday that he did not believe the administration had "misrepresented" intelligence about Iraq leading up to the war and that he privately corrected officials when he disagreed with what they were saying.
In a sometimes contentious hearing before the Senate Armed Service Committee, Tenet defended the administration’s description of Iraqi threats against charges that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, in particular, exaggerated the threat and did not tell the American people that some of intelligence assessments included significant caveats or were disputed by some intelligence agencies.
Asked by Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., whether he believed the administration had misrepresented the intelligence on Iraq, Tenet answered: "No sir, I don’t."
When Kennedy pressed the director about whether he had an obligation to stand up to policymakers when they were wrong, Tenet shot back: "I’m not going to sit here and tell you what my interaction was" with the president. "When I believed someone was misconstruing intelligence, I stood up and said something about it."
Tenet added that sometimes language used by policymakers in public "doesn’t uniquely comport" word for word, with the complex, more nuanced intelligence community language. "I lived up to my responsibility," he said.
Other Democratic members of the committee questioned why Tenet would not have made his disagreements known publicly. "I don’t do my job that way," he said. "If I believed something needs to be corrected, I go correct it."
Tenet said he could recall two instances in which he privately corrected administration officials.
One involved a statement by Cheney and others that Iraq sought uranium oxide for nuclear weapons from Niger, a claim U.S. intelligence officials believed was not based on sound information.
The other involved the certainty expressed by President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and others over whether certain vans found in Iraq were used to produce and move around biological weapons.
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