CIA Corrects Itself on WMD

CIA Corrects Itself on WMD

A report, the first of its kind, says Baghdad ended its chemical weapons program in '91.

By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7938.htm

02/01/05 "Los Angeles Times" -- WASHINGTON — In what may be a formal acknowledgment of the obvious, the CIA has issued a classified report revising its prewar assessments on Iraq and concluding that Baghdad abandoned its chemical weapons programs in 1991, intelligence officials familiar with the document said.

The report marks the first time the CIA has officially disavowed its prewar judgments and is one in a series of updated assessments the agency is producing as part of an effort to correct its record on Iraq's alleged weapons programs, officials said.

The CIA's decision to distribute the report — titled "Iraq: No Large-Scale Chemical Warfare Efforts Since Early 1990s" — in classified channels underscores the awkwardness the agency faces as it continues to reconcile its prewar reporting with postwar realities in Iraq. Before the war, the CIA asserted that Iraq had stockpiled biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.

A U.S. intelligence official said the document was "not a high-level report," meaning it was designed to supplant outdated assessments still on classified computer networks and was not meant to be called to the attention of President Bush or other senior government officials.

"It's basically updating the books," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, "so the information on the shelf is the most current."

Current and former intelligence officials described it as a highly unusual step for the CIA.

"It's stunning that they would actually put on paper a reversal" of previous intelligence estimates, said one intelligence official who had seen the document.

Richard J. Kerr, a former senior CIA official who was hired by the agency last year to conduct an internal review of its prewar analysis, said he couldn't recall the agency ever issuing such a revisionist report on any subject.

"But the situation is rather unique," Kerr said, noting that Iraq's postwar reality had made the agency's failings obvious. "Ordinarily, you're never proven wrong in a clean, neat way."

The report is based largely on findings by the Iraq Survey Group, a CIA-led team of weapons experts that searched the country for more than a year without finding clear evidence of active illegal weapons programs.

U.S. intelligence officials have long acknowledged that the prewar assessments were flawed. David Kay, the former head of the search team, told Congress last January, "We were almost all wrong."

But other officials' statements have been more qualified. In a speech at Georgetown University last February, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet said that "when the facts of Iraq are all in, we will neither be completely right nor completely wrong."

The new report from the CIA, which is dated Jan. 18, retreats from the agency's prewar assertions on chemical weapons on almost every front. It concludes that "Iraq probably did not pursue chemical warfare efforts after 1991."

The report notes that its new conclusions "vary significantly" from prewar judgments "largely because of subsequent events and direct access to Iraqi officials, scientists, facilities and documents."

A note in the report describes the document as the second in a "retrospective series that addresses our post-Operation Iraqi Freedom understanding of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and delivery system programs."

A Jan. 4 report focused on Scud missiles and other delivery systems. Intelligence officials said future reports would revise the agency's claims that Iraq had stockpiles of biological weapons and was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program. Those allegations were a centerpiece of the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq.

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
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INTELLIGENCE GATHERING: CIA, FBI, etc.
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Eric Lichtblau: Inspector General rebukes F.B.I. over espionage case and firing of Sibel Edmonds, New York Times, January 15, 2005

"In a long-awaited report that the Justice Department sought for months to keep classified, the inspector general issued a sharp rebuke to the F.B.I. over its handling of claims of espionage and ineptitude made by Sibel Edmonds, a bureau translator who was fired in 2002 after superiors deemed her conduct "disruptive." Ms. Edmonds, who translated material in Turkish, Persian and Azerbaijani, had complained about slipshod translations and management problems in the bureau's translation section and raised accusations of possible espionage against a fellow linguist. . . . Ms. Edmonds's case has become a cause célèbre for critics who accused the bureau of retaliating against her and other whistle-blowers who have sought to expose management problems related to the campaign against terrorism." (1/18)

Douglas Jehl: New CIA Chief Tells Workers to Back Administration Policies, New York Times, November 17, 2004

"Porter J. Goss, the new intelligence chief, has told Central Intelligence Agency employees that their job is to "support the administration and its policies in our work,'' a copy of an internal memorandum shows. "As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies," Mr. Goss said in the memorandum, which was circulated late on Monday. He said in the document that he was seeking "to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road." (See also Blue Lemur: Full Statement of CIA Director Porter Goss to Agency Acquired by Raw Story , and Daily Kos: Bush Plans to Purge the 'Disloyal' at CIA ). (11/23)

Robert Parry: Bush's 'perception management' plan, Consotrium News, November 19, 2004

"George W. Bush has been criticized for disdaining fact in favor of faith in his own instincts. But he is savvy about the dangers that information can present to his authority over the government and the American people. That is why the first priority of his second term has been the elimination of the few government sources of information that could challenge the images he wants to project to the public. Bush doesn't want the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency portraying his Iraq and other foreign policies as abject failures or reckless adventures. So, by attacking these remaining pockets of analytical resistance, Bush is moving to ensure that his administration can keep much of the U.S. population seeing a near-empty cup as almost entirely full, a concept known in the intelligence world as 'perception management.' " (11/23)

Ari Berman: Pass Now, Investigate Later, The Nation, October 27, 2004

"The Bush Administration's modus operandi: tough on terror, weak on the truth. And its friends in high places are always willing to lend a helping hand to distort, suppress and postpone facts crucial to America's national security. Case in point: The recent efforts of the CIA and its partisan stooge Porter Goss to suppress the release of a sharply critical report on the Administration's and agency's handling of 9/11. The document is "not yet finished," CIA officials told the Los Angeles Times, which broke the story last Tuesday. Only that seems to be yet another lie. According to Newsweek, the CIA finished its 17-month, 11-member team investigation last June. ... "Everybody feels it will be better off if thi... the fan after the election," an agency official said. Why? Because, according to Robert Scheer, "this one names names." (11/1)

Warren Strobel/Jonathan Landay: Post-election Purge, Reform Appears Likely Within CIA,
Knight Ridder, October 22, 2004

Why Bush appointed GOP toady Porter Goss to head up CIA: "Porter Goss' initial moves as CIA director appear to herald a post-election purge at the already troubled spy agency, according to current and former top U.S. intelligence officials. Goss, a former Republican congressman, has put at least four former Capitol Hill Republican staffers into top positions in his CIA office and has given them broad authority to make personnel and restructuring decisions, the current and former intelligence officials said. One of the aides, whose identity Knight Ridder is not disclosing because he served under cover, has been 'going around telling people they are to fire 80 to 90 people' in the Directorate of Operations, the CIA's covert arm, according to a former official....Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and, to some extent, President Bush have expressed anger at the CIA for intelligence estimates on such issues as Saddam's links with al-Qaida that do not conform with White House views."(10/25)

Robert Scheer: The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket, Los Angeles Times via Common Dreams, October 19, 2004

"It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago. "It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that 'the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward.' " (10/21)

Phillip Sherwell: The CIA 'old guard' goes to war with Bush, Telegraph/UK, October 10, 2004

"A powerful "old guard" faction in the Central Intelligence Agency has launched an unprecedented campaign to undermine the Bush administration with a battery of damaging leaks and briefings about Iraq. The White House is incensed by the increasingly public sniping from some senior intelligence officers who, it believes, are conducting a partisan operation to swing the election on November 2 in favour of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, and against George W Bush. . . . In the latest clash, a senior former CIA agent revealed that Mr Cheney "blew up" when a report into links between the Saddam regime and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist behind the kidnappings and beheadings of hostages in Iraq, including the Briton Kenneth Bigley, proved inconclusive. Other recent leaks have included the contents of classified reports drawn up by CIA analysts before the invasion of Iraq, warning the White House about the dangers of post-war instability. Specifically, the reports said that rogue Ba'athist elements might team up with terrorist groups to wage a guerrilla war." (10/11)

David Barstow/William Broad/Jeff Gerth: How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence, New York Tmes, October 3, 2004

"Far from 'group think,' American nuclear and intelligence experts argued bitterly over the tubes. A 'holy war' is how one Congressional investigator described it. But if the opinions of the nuclear experts were seemingly disregarded at every turn, an overwhelming momentum gathered behind the C.I.A. assessment. It was a momentum built on a pattern of haste, secrecy, ambiguity, bureaucratic maneuver and a persistent failure in the Bush administration and among both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to ask hard questions...[Tenet] said he 'made it clear' to the White House 'that the case for a possible nuclear program in Iraq was weaker than that for chemical and biological weapons'." (10/4)

Josh Marshall/Laura Rozen/Paul Glastis: Iran-Contra II?: Fresh scrutiny on a rogue Pentagon operation, Washington Monthly, September 2004 issue

"The investigation of Franklin is now shining a bright light on a shadowy struggle within the Bush administration over the direction of U.S. policy toward Iran. In particular, the FBI is looking with renewed interest at an unauthorized back-channel between Iranian dissidents and advisers in Feith's office, which more senior administration officials first tried in vain to shut down and then later attempted to cover up." (10/4)

Suzanne Goldenberg: Bush Ignored Warnings on Iraq Insurgency Threat Before Invasion, Guardian (U.K.), September 29, 2004

Another leak from the CIA, anxious to hit back at the Bush Administration: "The Bush administration disregarded intelligence reports two months before the invasion of Iraq which warned that a war could unleash a violent insurgency and rising anti-US sentiment in the Middle East, it emerged yesterday. The warning, delivered in two classified reports to the White House in January 2003, was prepared by the National Intelligence Council, the same advisory board that warned the Bush administration last month that the violence in Iraq could descend into a civil war. That forecast radically departs from George Bush's upbeat assertions that the situation is improving in Iraq, and he initially dismissed the assessment as a 'guess'." (See also Digby's "Pink Slip"). (9/30)

Daniel Ellsberg: Truths Worth Telling, New York Times, September 28, 2004

"Understandably, the American people are reluctant to believe that their president has made errors of judgment that have cost American lives. To convince them otherwise, there is no substitute for hard evidence: documents, photographs, transcripts. Often the only way for the public to get such evidence is if a dedicated public servant decides to release it without permission. Such a leak occurred recently with the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was prepared in July. Reports of the estimate's existence and overall pessimism - but not its actual conclusions - have prompted a long-overdue debate on the realities and prospects of the war. But its judgments of the relative likelihood and the strength of evidence pointing to the worst possibilities remain undisclosed. Since the White House has refused to release the full report, someone else should do so...The military's real estimates of the projected costs - in manpower, money and casualties - of various long-term plans for Iraq should be made public, in addition to the more immediate costs in American and Iraqi lives of the planned offensive against resistant cities in Iraq that appears scheduled for November. If military or intelligence experts within the government predict disastrous political consequences in Iraq from such urban attacks, these judgments should not remain secret. [Neither should] leaks on the timing of this offensive -- and on possible call-up of reserves just after the election." (See also Ivan Eland's "More Bureaucracy, Less National Security"). (9/30)

Mary Jacoby: Seymour Hersh's alternative history of Bush's war, Salon.com, September 18, 2004

"In a new book, "Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," Hersh expands upon his work in the New Yorker to contribute new insights and revelations. He discloses how a CIA analyst's report on abuses against captured Taliban prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, made its way to the White House in 2002, putting National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on notice two years before the Abu Ghraib scandal that human rights violations were taking place in U.S.-run prisons abroad. In March 2002, Hersh writes, a military action against al-Qaida, known as Operation Anaco