Solomonia Archive: "CIA head defends Iraq intelligence"

Saturday, May 31, 2003

Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / CIA head defends Iraq intelligence

WASHINGTON - CIA Director George Tenet took the unusual step yesterday of publicly defending the agency's intelligence on Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons amid growing criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated what it knew about the Iraqi weapons programs to advance its case for going to war. [...]

Did they exaggerate? It seems to me they didn't have to. They certainly made a case. I'm not sure how you do that without being firm in what you're saying and not being namby-pamby. "Well, they may have some weapons...but hey, who knows?"

The point was we couldn't be sure, because the Iraqis weren't cooperating and given Saddam's track record and the world we live in today, no one was going to take that chance.

Tenet's statement came in response to the release Thursday of a ''memorandum'' to President Bush posted on several Internet sites by a group of retired CIA and State Department intelligence analysts who said there was ''growing mistrust and cynicism'' among intelligence professionals over ''intelligence cited by you and your chief advisers to justify the war against Iraq.''

State and elements of CIA, eh? OK, something begins to make sense here.

[...]The group, which calls itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, said a failure to find weapons of mass destruction after six weeks of searching ''suggests either that such weapons are simply not there or that those eventually found there will not be in sufficent quantity or capability to support your repeated claim that Iraq posed a grave threat to our country's security.''[...]

Did Tenet say that? I thought the point was that even a small quantity of such weapons in the hands of a man like Saddam represented a grave threat. You know, the weapons everyone understands he had and that he certainly wanted and might acquire through the program everyone believes he also had?

This is going to go on and on. Just as before the war when people were hearing only what they wanted, Bush is going to have to keep hammering home the multiple reasons for what's gone on, only now he's got the added challenge of doing it without sounding snivelling.

Posted by Solomon at 8:09 AM on Saturday, May 31, 2003
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