The CIA responded angrily on Friday to new congressional criticism of its handling of prewar intelligence about Iraq's suspected illicit weapons program. At a briefing at CIA headquarters, four senior intelligence officials said that a top-secret internal review now under way had found no evidence of faulty work.
"What it has shown us is that the judgments were not only sound, they were very sound, and backed up by more than one source," a senior intelligence official said of the review, which is being conducted under orders from George Tenet, the director of central intelligence.
The briefing was organized in response to a report in The Washington Post that said the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was preparing to issue a report saying that intelligence agencies made serious errors of judgment in reaching their prewar conclusion that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program.
In an angry public statement, the CIA spokesman, Bill Harlow, said that any such finding would be premature. Harlow said that top intelligence officials had not yet been given an opportunity to share their own findings with members of the intelligence committee.
Congressional officials said that the detailed review by the Senate committee had indeed turned up indications of serious errors.
But Senator Pat Roberts, the panel chairman, issued a statement saying that the committee was nowhere near completing its review and that it would hear from Tenet and others before reaching any findings.
The senior intelligence officials who outlined findings from a 405-page review being conducted by the National Intelligence Council said that it would be David Kay, the American heading the search for illicit weapons in Iraq, who would ultimately determine if the CIA had been right.
"We don't think what we did was deficient, we don't think it was sloppy, and we're waiting to see what David finds to see whether we got it right," a senior official said.
The reference was to Kay, who said in an interim report this month that his team had not yet found any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in Iraq.
But, it added, his search would not be completed until sometime next year.
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