Related ... (Boston Globe)
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.
The statement by Tenet - a rarity for a director of central intelligence, who normally does not react publicly to criticism about intelligence matters except during testimony before Congress - underscored the ferment that has been building within the intelligence agencies because of the inability to date of US forces in Iraq to uncover any proscribed weapons.
Three complaints have been filed with the CIA ombudsman about the possible politicization by the administration of intelligence on Iraq, an intelligence official said, but he would not describe the substance of the complaints. One senior administration official said there have been complaints by CIA analysts that they felt pressured by administration policy makers who questioned them before the war about the basis for their assessment of Iraq's weapons programs.
''Our role is to call it like we see it, to tell policy makers what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and what we base it on,'' Tenet said in a statement released by the CIA. ''The integrity of our process was maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong.''
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.''
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.''
The group called on the president to allow United Nations inspectors to return to Iraq, saying, ''If the US doesn't make undisputed discoveries of forbidden weapons, the failure will feed already widespread skepticism abroad about the motives for going to war.'' It added that intelligence in the past had been ''warped for political purposes but never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize launching a war.''
In a Feb. 5 speech at the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made the administration's case for going to war. Asked about the intelligence controversy yesterday, Powell asked for patience while the CIA and Congress look into the matter.
''There are always people who come after the fact to say, this wasn't what was presented to you, or this was politicized, or this wasn't,'' he said. ''Let people look into it, let people examine it.''
Speaking as he arrived in Krakow, Poland, yesterday, Bush dismissed charges that the administration had failed to prove its case that Iraq undertook proscribed weapons programs. He cited the discovery last month of two trucks in Iraq that US intelligence officials said appeared to be mobile facilities for the production of biological weapons.
''For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them,'' Bush said.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant General James Conway, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, added a new voice to the mystery of Iraq's weapons when he said that he, too, was surprised that no chemical weapons had yet been found.
In a teleconference call from Baghdad to reporters in Washington, Conway said he ''truly thought,'' based on intelligence relayed before the war, that chemical weapons had been distributed to Iraqi Republican Guard units whose commanders had authority to fire them.
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