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Senate report blast CIA intel on Iraq
The CIA failed to penetrate Saddam Hussein’s regime sufficiently before the war to find out what weapons Iraq possessed, and agency analysts applied faulty logic to the sketchy information they did have to conclude Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, a Senate committee report due out today says. On the eve of the scheduled release of the report highly critical of his agency, CIA Director George Tenet bade an emotional farewell to agency employees Thursday, calling the criticism "the nature of a tough, essential business."

Though the report focuses on the CIA and does not discuss the White House role, Senate Democrats charge that the Bush administration is also to blame for overplaying shaky prewar intelligence on Iraq. Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the No. 2 Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Thursday that a newly declassified CIA finding shows that the administration exaggerated prewar reports asserting links between al-Qaeda and Saddam’s regime. The 560-page Senate Intelligence Committee report was described in broad terms by 10 officials with knowledge of its contents, including committee members, staffers and U.S. intelligence officials. The aides and intelligence officials requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. The report examines the intelligence gathering process on Iraq, including the failure to find any of the chemical and biological weapons that the CIA said Saddam possessed. Those weapons were one of the justifications for war in Iraq.

"The report finds that the intelligence community’s reporting on Iraq was not reliable," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a member of the panel. "That is a terrible condemnation of an agency that is our first line of defense." Among the issues explored:
• CIA field officers who intercepted aluminum tubes bound for Iraq reported that the tubes were for use in uranium centrifuges to make nuclear bomb fuel, even though the officers had no expertise in bombmaking. Agency analysts and outside experts hired by the CIA then faced bureaucratic opposition to the suggestion that the tubes might have been bought to build ordinary rockets.

• Despite aggressive efforts to contact scientists involved in Iraqi weapons programs, the CIA never got further than a handful of distant relatives who repeated the official line that Iraq had gotten rid of its weapons of mass destruction. Agency spies never reached the scientists themselves.

• The CIA’s intelligence reporting on Iraq warned that information about its weapons was inconclusive, yet the agency went on to reach firm conclusions about those very weapons. About 80 pages of the report have been censored at CIA insistence out of security concerns, an issue that sparked intense negotiations between the committee and the CIA.
"This is a matter of the American people’s right to know if there ever was one," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., vice chairman of the committee. "It’s not going to be a happy report."

Tenet’s last day on the job is Sunday, the seven-year anniversary of his swearing-in. He departs as the second-longest-serving director, behind Allen Dulles, who served 1953-61. About 1,500 agency employees, joined by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, FBI Director Robert Mueller and others, attended a send-off ceremony Thursday at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. "These have been eventful years, filled with exhilaration and triumph, with pain and sorrow, and, yes, with questions about our performance," Tenet said.

President Bush has not chosen a successor but is considering former Navy secretary John Lehman, a member of the Sept. 11 Commission who has sharply criticized the CIA, and Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which said the CIA’s human intelligence operations must be completely revamped.

Tenet has rejected claims that the CIA’s failures stemmed from organizational problems. That attitude prompted Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the Senate panel’s chairman, to say the CIA was "in denial." Tenet was not backing off Thursday. He told CIA employees that "if people or leaders want to take you back in a different direction, then it is your voices that must be heard to say, ’We know better, and we’re not going to put up with it.’ "

Although the Senate committee’s report was approved unanimously, committee Democrats planned to make public "additional views" to argue that Bush administration officials exaggerated Iraq intelligence and must share the blame for faulty prewar judgments. Levin said Thursday that a response by Tenet to a committee query supported that claim. In the July 1 reply, Tenet addressed repeated assertions that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met in Prague with Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmed al-Ani five months before the terrorist attack. "Although we cannot rule it out, we are increasingly skeptical that such a meeting occurred," Tenet wrote, noting "the absence of any credible information that the April 2001 meeting occurred." Before the war, Vice President Cheney said the meeting was "pretty well confirmed." Last month, Cheney said the meeting "has never been proven; it’s never been refuted."
Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-07-09
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=37538