President Bush's top foreign policy advisers insisted on Sunday that all of the evidence available to them starting last October pointed to efforts by Saddam Hussein to revive his weapons programs. They dismissed as "revisionist history" charges that intelligence had been twisted to justify an attack on Iraq.
The comments on Sunday by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Condoleezza Rice, were part of a coordinated effort by the White House to quell questions about whether they had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam.
But the arguments that they put forward varied somewhat from the explanations that senior administration officials offered to reporters a few weeks ago on a background basis and appeared to open the possibility that, in the end, US forces might find that Saddam had several development programs under way, but few or no weapons ready for use.
PHOTOS: REUTERS
Bush appeared to be edging toward that direction on Thursday, when he told troops at the US Central Command in Qatar that mobile biological laboratories found in Iraq showed that Saddam was "capable" of producing biological weapons. That is somewhat different from saying that he possessed chemical and biological weapons, the argument that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made repeatedly before the war.
On Sunday, Rice argued that the administration made the best judgment it could and that a succession of central intelligence directors had made the same judgments as far back as 1996.
"Successive CIA directors, successive administrations, have known that we had every reason to judge that he had weapons of mass destruction," Rice argued on the NBC News program Meet the Press. She said that if the CIA had come to a different conclusion, it would have constituted a failure to "connect the dots," a clear reference to the term used to question why the agency did not put together evidence that a terror attack was in the works before Sept. 11, 2001.
"The fact is this was a program that was built for concealment," Rice said. "We've always known that. We have always known that it would take some time to put together a full picture of his weapons of mass destruction programs."
Powell and Rice did not repeat the argument that many in the administration had made privately in recent weeks -- that Saddam had chemical "precursors" and biological agents but kept them in nonweaponized form so that they would not arouse the suspicions of UN inspectors. Those same officials went on to tell reporters, before and during Bush's Middle East trip, that Saddam did not have time between the withdrawal of the inspectors and the start of the war to put together the components into chemical and biological weapons.
Both officials disputed suggestions that the administration had exaggerated intelligence to build a larger coalition, or to win domestic support for a war. They both said it would take more time to uncover the evidence of Iraq's weapons efforts -- the time they were unwilling to extend to UN inspectors in March. Interviews with scientists and others are proceeding, they said, and another 1,300 US experts are now joining the search.
But it is unclear how much time Rice and Bush have before a number of congressional inquiries begin, and other nations begin to question US credibility on similar issues, including evidence about the Iranian and North Korean weapons programs, among others.
The crucial document Rice cited was the October 2002 "National Intelligence Estimate," which was the basis for administration statements that Saddam possessed proscribed weapons.
That intelligence estimate bore the stamp of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence. On Sunday, White House officials appeared to be subtly shifting the issue from whether they twisted conclusions to what the CIA said as it prepared the estimate, a consensus document that is supposed to reflect the conclusions of competing intelligence services.
The document noted the extensive findings of UN inspectors, before their withdrawal from Iraq in 1998, of missing stores of chemical weapons, biological precursors and equipment.
Powell, appearing on Fox News, noted that the mobile biological laboratories found by US forces bore great resemblance to those he described to the United Nations in February. "I would put before you exhibit A, the mobile biological labs that we have found," he said. `Now, people are saying, well, are they truly mobile biological labs? Yes, they are."
So far, however, there has been no evidence that the labs were ever put into use in producing the critical materials for biological weapons.
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