| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"¥" |
| Date: |
22 Jul 2003 07:00:40 PM |
| Object: |
What's Bush cooking for dinner this week? |
Iraq link to terror judged not likely before Bush speech
Walter Pincus, Washington Post Monday, July 21, 2003
Washington -- Last fall, the administration repeatedly warned in public of
the danger that an unprovoked Iraqi President Saddam Hussein might give
chemical or biological weapons to terrorists. "Iraq could decide on any
given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist or
individual terrorists," President Bush said in Cincinnati on Oct. 7.
"Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America
without leaving any fingerprints."
But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate
released Friday by the White House show that at the time of the president's
speech, the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be
unlikely.
In fact, the estimate, completed Oct. 2, shows the intelligence services
were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda
terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his regime were collapsing
after a military attack by the United States
"Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization
such as al Qaeda, . . . already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against
the United States, could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he
would hope to conduct," said one key judgment of the estimate. It went on to
say that Hussein might decide to take the "extreme step" of assisting al
Qaeda in a terrorist attack against the United States if it "would be his
last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with
him."
The declassified sections of the estimate were offered by the White House to
rebut allegations that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on
Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The result, however, could be to raise more
questions about whether the administration misrepresented the judgments of
the intelligence services on another basis for going to war: the threat
posed by Hussein as a source of weapons for terrorists.
The estimate's findings also raise concerns about the continuing dangers
posed by Hussein, who is in hiding, and the failure to find any of his
alleged stocks of chemical and biological weapons. If such stocks exist, a
hotly debated proposition, this is precisely the kind of dangerous situation
the CIA and other intelligence services warned about last fall,
administration officials said.
A senior administration official said Saturday the U.S. intelligence
community does not know "the extent to which Saddam Hussein has access or
control" over the various groups that are attacking U.S. forces or the
location of any possible hidden chemical or biological agents or weapons.
Last fall, as Congress began debating a resolution giving Bush authority to
go to war against Iraq, CIA Director George Tenet ordered six intelligence
services to develop over a 10-day period a common assessment of Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction programs and the threat they posed. On Oct. 5,
at the request of members of Congress who wanted material they could use in
public debate, the administration released a 25-page declassified summary of
the 90- page classified report.
Two days later, in response to pressure from Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., then-
chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Tenet released
three pages of additional information from the National Intelligence
Estimate and a classified hearing that for the first time showed that
Hussein might use chemical or biological weapons only when under threat of
attack.
Friday's declassified material gave a much more complete picture of the
intelligence in the form of all the key judgments of the intelligence
community.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/21/MN105561.DTL
--
Asked for the first time about the (Iraq) uranium issue,
Bush said: "There's going to be a lot of attempts to rewrite history."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=584&ncid=584&e=1&u=/nm/20030
709/pl_nm/iraq_bush_dc
--
He (Rumsfeld) told the committee that "the fact that the facts change from
time to time with respect to specifics does not surprise me or shock me at
all; it is all to be expected. It is part of the intelligence world we live
in."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3054423.stm
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