CIA reviews pre-war WMD intelligence
The CIA is reviewing a top secret intelligence report to decide whether Washington miscalculated the extent of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes, it emerged today.
The review comes as US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair come under increasing pressure to explain why no banned weapons have been found by coalition forces in Iraq.
The American report in question concluded that Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear programme, The New York Times said.
It was seen by Bush, and provided the White House with its last major overview of the status of Iraq’s programme to develop weapons of mass destruction before the start of the war.
The document, called a national intelligence estimate, was issued last October, the newspaper said.
CIA Director George Tenet has brought in a small team of retired agency analysts to study it and other intelligence work produced before the war.
Separately, the CIA is giving politicians the underlying documents used by analysts to prepare the national estimate, just as Congress and the Senate prepare for their own reviews of the pre-war intelligence, the Times said.
Both US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Tenet have been forced in recent days to defend their handling of intelligence in the months before the war.
Tenet has denied the Iraq intelligence was warped in order to satisfy the Bush administration’s desire to find evidence to support its policies.
“The integrity of our process was maintained throughout, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong,” he said.
It is those suggestions that will come under scrutiny from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is also planning its own examination, the newspaper said.
In a May 22 letter, the leaders of the House panel asked Tenet to answer a series of questions including whether the “sources and methods that contributed to the community’s analysis on the presence and amount of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq were of sufficient quality and quantity to provide sufficient accuracy.”
