Beginning last summer, US President George W. Bush administration officials insisted that they had compelling new evidence about Iraq's prohibited weapons programs, and only occasionally acknowledged in public how little they actually knew about the status of Baghdad's chemical, biological or nuclear arms.
Some officials belittled the on-again, off-again UN inspections after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, suggesting that the inspectors had missed important evidence. "Even as they were conducting the most intrusive system of arms control in history, the inspectors missed a great deal," US Vice President Dick Cheney said in August, before the inspections resumed.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
In the fall, as the debate intensified over whether or not to have inspectors return to Iraq, senior government officials continued to suggest that the US had new or better intelligence that Iraq's weapons programs were accelerating -- information that the UN lacked.
"After 11 years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more," Bush declared in a speech in Cincinnati in October. "And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon."
"Clearly, to actually work, any new inspections, sanctions, or enforcement mechanisms will have to be very different," he added.
Now, with the failure so far to find prohibited weapons in Iraq, US intelligence officials and senior members of the administration have acknowledged that there was little new evidence flowing into US intelligence agencies in the five years since UN inspectors left Iraq, creating an intelligence vacuum.
Rice
Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, said on Saturday that the question of new evidence versus old was beside the point. "The question of what is new after 1998 is not an interesting question," she said. "There is a body of evidence since 1991. You have to look at that body of evidence and say what does this require the US to do? Then you are compelled to act."
In a series of recent interviews, intelligence and other officials described the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the White House as essentially blinded after the UN inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998. They were left grasping for whatever slivers they could obtain, like unconfirmed reports of attempts to buy uranium, or fragmentary reports about the movements of suspected terrorists.
Bush has continued to express confidence that evidence of weapons programs will be found in Iraq, and the administration has recently restructured the weapons hunt after the teams dispatched by the Pentagon immediately after the war confronted an array of problems on the ground and came up mostly empty-handed.
Rumsfeld
US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offered a nuanced analysis to Congress recently about the role that US intelligence played as the administration built its case against Saddam.
"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder," he said."We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light: through the prism of our experience on Sept. 11."
Kerr
Richard Kerr, who headed a four-member team of retired CIA officials that reviewed prewar intelligence about Iraq, said analysts at the CIA and other agencies were forced to rely heavily on evidence that was five years old at least.
Intelligence analysts drew heavily "on a base of hard evidence growing out of the lead-up to the first war, the first war itself and then the inspections process," Kerr said.
Tenet
George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, in February expressed confidence in much of the intelligence about Iraq, saying it "comes to us from credible and reliable sources."
Within the White House, the intelligence agencies, the Defense Department and the State Department, the shortage of fresh evidence touched off a struggle. Officials in the National Security Council and the vice president's office wanted to present every shred of evidence against Saddam. Those working for US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and some analysts in the intelligence agencies, insisted that that all the dots must be connected before the US endorsed the evidence as the predicate for war.
This struggle, several officials said, explains the confusion about how the administration assembled its case, and how some evidence could be interpreted differently in public presentations before the war.
An internal CIA review of prewar intelligence on Iraq, recently submitted to the agency's director, Tenet, has found that the evidence collected by the CIA and other intelligence agencies after 1998 was mostly fragmentary and often inconclusive.
In hindsight, it is now clear just how dependent the US intelligence community was on the UN weapons inspections process.
The inspections aided intelligence agencies directly, by providing witnesses' accounts from ground level, and indirectly, by prodding the Iraqis and forcing them to try to move and hide people and equipment, activities that American spy satellites and listening stations could monitor. Watching from space as Iraq tried to hide things from the inspectors proved to be invaluable in gauging the scope of the Iraqi weapons efforts, current and former intelligence officials said.
According to Kerr, the former CIA analyst, given the history of Iraq's weapons programs, "it would have been hard for analysts to go the other way" and conclude that the programs were moribund.
Powell
By the time Powell arrived in the conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency on Friday, Jan. 31, three days after the State of the Union address, the presentation he was scheduled to make at the UN in just five days was in tatters.
Powell's chief of staff had called his boss the day before to warn that "we can't connect all the dots" in the intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs.
Powell's staff had discovered that statements in intelligence assessments did not always match up with the documentary exhibits that Powell had insisted on including in his presentation.
Apart from some satellite photographs of facilities rebuilt after they had been bombed during the Clinton administration in 1998, the only new pieces of evidence that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear program focused on what he was attempting to buy.
While the National Intelligence Estimate, which was published in October and declassified on Friday, clearly stated that Saddam "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade," Powell's own intelligence unit, in a dissenting view, said, "the activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case" that Iraq was pursuing what it called "an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."
The CIA also had scant new evidence about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but specialists began working on the issue under the direction of Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy. These analysts did not develop any new intelligence data, but looked at existing intelligence reports for possible links between Iraq and terrorists that they felt might have been overlooked or undervalued.
An aide to Rumsfeld suggested that the defense secretary look at the work of the analysts on Feith's staff. At a Pentagon news conference last year, Rumsfeld said, "I was so interested in it, I said, `Gee, why don't you go over and brief George Tenet?' So they did. They went over and briefed the CIA. So there's no -- there's no mystery about all this."
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