WASHINGTON, July 9 — The Central Intelligence Agency repeatedly told the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks that evidence linking Iraq to Al Qaeda was "murky" and conflicting.
That judgment contrasted starkly with the Bush administration's depiction of a close, well-documented relationship, which it used to justify the war in Iraq, according to the findings of a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday.
The C.I.A.'s conclusions on the issue of a possible Iraq-Qaeda link largely mirror those of staff investigators of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. That panel's staff reported last month that there did not appear to have been a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda and that there was no credible evidence linking Iraq to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report, which otherwise harshly criticized the C.I.A. for overstating the threat posed by Iraq before last year's invasion, praised the way the C.I.A. analysts had studied — and largely discounted — theories about close working ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
"The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda throughout the 1990's but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship," the Senate report said, adding that the C.I.A's assessment that "there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an Al Qaeda attack was responsible and objective."
The Senate report is, overall, a scorching attack on the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies, charging that they provided the White House with faulty and overstated information about Iraqi threats in the year before the Iraq war, especially in their claim that Iraq was concealing large stocks of chemical and biological weapons, developing nuclear arms and designing unmanned aerial drones to deliver lethal unconventional weapons.
In a television interview last month, Vice President Dick Cheney insisted that "there's clearly been a relationship" between Mr. Hussein and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and that "the evidence is overwhelming."
But the Senate report identified five highly classified intelligence summaries prepared within the C.I.A. and then distributed outside the agency after Sept. 11 that suggested that if there were significant ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, they were difficult to prove.
The agency said it had "no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other Al Qaeda strike" and that "the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda appears to more closely resemble that of two independent actors trying to exploit each other."
The Senate report said the agency had long ago discounted a Czech intelligence report, cited by Mr. Cheney as recently as a few weeks ago, that a ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks had met in Prague in April 2001 with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer. "The C.I.A. judged that other evidence indicated that these meetings likely never occurred," the Senate report said.
The Senate report also cited other information available to the C.I.A. that suggested that Iraq would have been wary of any dealings with Al Qaeda, noting that the agency was aware that the Iraqi government had a pattern of arresting and executing Islamic extremists, and that the Iraqi government had sought "to prevent Iraq youth from joining Al Qaeda."
The White House is likely to cite other evidence in the Senate report as bolstering its argument that there was a close tie between Mr. Hussein and the terror network, including the disclosure in the report that a captured Qaeda leader, Abu Zubaydah, has told interrogators that he understood that "an important Al Qaeda associate" had "good relationships with Iraqi intelligence."
The associate, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who has been linked to Al Qaeda in the past, is accused by the Bush administration of orchestrating the anti-American insurgency in Iraq. Still, the Senate report noted that Mr. Zubaydah "offered his opinion that it would be extremely unlikely for bin Laden to have agreed to ally with Iraq due to his desire to keep the organization on track with its mission and maintain its operational independence."
The evidence cited in the Senate report suggests that George J. Tenet, the departing director of central intelligence, sometimes went beyond the conclusions of his agency's analysts in appearances on Capitol Hill before the Iraq invasion.
In testimony in February 2003 in the Senate, the report noted, Mr. Tenet said — without the sort of qualifications found in the reports of his analysts — that "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb-making to Al Qaeda. It has also provided training in poisons and gases to two Al Qaeda associates."
Citing Close-Mindedness
The C.I.A.'s assertion, in its national intelligence estimate, that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program "was not supported by the intelligence," the Senate report said, and in some ways reflected an unwillingness to consider the views of outside analysts.
The report said this close-mindedness was most evident in the cases of high-strength aluminum tubes, which the agency believed Iraq was trying to acquire to use as centrifuges to enrich uranium — a prerequisite for developing nuclear weapons. The committee found that C.I.A. personnel did not invite experts from the Department of Energy to participate in tests on the tubes. When asked why not, an agency official told the committee, "because we funded it. It was our testing. We were trying to prove some things that we wanted to prove with the testing."
The committee found that all of the equipment acquired by Iraq had conventional military or industrial uses, and the tubes in question appeared to be for building rockets.
The report dealt equally harshly with the administration's contention, voiced by President Bush in his State of the Union speech last year, that Iraq had sought to buy yellowcake uranium in Africa.
Administration officials have since conceded that there was not sufficient evidence for such a charge, and the report faults Mr. Tenet for failing to read the president's speech and fact-check it himself.
The committee faulted the C.I.A. for failing to notify the Senate that the agency was conducting its own review of the report from Niger, or to mention that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research asserted that it was based on forged documents. Christopher Marquis (NYT)
Overreaching Conclusions
Before the war, the intelligence community's major conclusions about Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs far exceeded what could be drawn from available intelligence and overstated the judgments of intelligence analysts, the Senate committee concluded in its report on Friday.
The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate stated that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons." But the Senate panel found that conclusion "overstated both what was known and what intelligence analysts judged about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons holdings."
The Senate report also rejected the contention that "all key aspects" of Iraq's offensive biological weapons program had been active before the war. Information reviewed by the committee showed this conclusion was "not supported by the underlying intelligence."
While the intelligence did show that Iraq was renovating or expanding facilities that had been "associated" with Iraq's biological programs and was engaged in research that had biological applications, "few reports suggested specifically that the activity was related" to biological warfare.
The Senate report strongly criticized the handling of information about Iraq's supposed mobile biological weapons facilities provided by a source known as Curveball, finding that the C.I.A. failed to disclose important information about the source's reliability.
In addition, the intelligence community assessment that Mr. Hussein had probably stockpiled 100 metric tons of chemical weapons agents, and perhaps as much as 500 tons, was based on an analytical judgment and not on intelligence reporting, the committee said.
However, the panel found that available intelligence did support a conclusion that biological and chemical weapons "were within Iraq's technological capability" and that Iraq was trying to obtain material that could have been used to produce them. Findings about Iraq's capability to produce and weaponize biological agents were "for the most part supported" by intelligence, the committee found.
PHILIP SHENON
NY Times
[This message was edited by wilheim on July 10, 2004 at 02:30 AM.]
That judgment contrasted starkly with the Bush administration's depiction of a close, well-documented relationship, which it used to justify the war in Iraq, according to the findings of a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday.
The C.I.A.'s conclusions on the issue of a possible Iraq-Qaeda link largely mirror those of staff investigators of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. That panel's staff reported last month that there did not appear to have been a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda and that there was no credible evidence linking Iraq to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report, which otherwise harshly criticized the C.I.A. for overstating the threat posed by Iraq before last year's invasion, praised the way the C.I.A. analysts had studied — and largely discounted — theories about close working ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
"The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda throughout the 1990's but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship," the Senate report said, adding that the C.I.A's assessment that "there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an Al Qaeda attack was responsible and objective."
The Senate report is, overall, a scorching attack on the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies, charging that they provided the White House with faulty and overstated information about Iraqi threats in the year before the Iraq war, especially in their claim that Iraq was concealing large stocks of chemical and biological weapons, developing nuclear arms and designing unmanned aerial drones to deliver lethal unconventional weapons.
In a television interview last month, Vice President Dick Cheney insisted that "there's clearly been a relationship" between Mr. Hussein and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and that "the evidence is overwhelming."
But the Senate report identified five highly classified intelligence summaries prepared within the C.I.A. and then distributed outside the agency after Sept. 11 that suggested that if there were significant ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, they were difficult to prove.
The agency said it had "no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other Al Qaeda strike" and that "the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda appears to more closely resemble that of two independent actors trying to exploit each other."
The Senate report said the agency had long ago discounted a Czech intelligence report, cited by Mr. Cheney as recently as a few weeks ago, that a ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks had met in Prague in April 2001 with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer. "The C.I.A. judged that other evidence indicated that these meetings likely never occurred," the Senate report said.
The Senate report also cited other information available to the C.I.A. that suggested that Iraq would have been wary of any dealings with Al Qaeda, noting that the agency was aware that the Iraqi government had a pattern of arresting and executing Islamic extremists, and that the Iraqi government had sought "to prevent Iraq youth from joining Al Qaeda."
The White House is likely to cite other evidence in the Senate report as bolstering its argument that there was a close tie between Mr. Hussein and the terror network, including the disclosure in the report that a captured Qaeda leader, Abu Zubaydah, has told interrogators that he understood that "an important Al Qaeda associate" had "good relationships with Iraqi intelligence."
The associate, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who has been linked to Al Qaeda in the past, is accused by the Bush administration of orchestrating the anti-American insurgency in Iraq. Still, the Senate report noted that Mr. Zubaydah "offered his opinion that it would be extremely unlikely for bin Laden to have agreed to ally with Iraq due to his desire to keep the organization on track with its mission and maintain its operational independence."
The evidence cited in the Senate report suggests that George J. Tenet, the departing director of central intelligence, sometimes went beyond the conclusions of his agency's analysts in appearances on Capitol Hill before the Iraq invasion.
In testimony in February 2003 in the Senate, the report noted, Mr. Tenet said — without the sort of qualifications found in the reports of his analysts — that "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb-making to Al Qaeda. It has also provided training in poisons and gases to two Al Qaeda associates."
Citing Close-Mindedness
The C.I.A.'s assertion, in its national intelligence estimate, that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program "was not supported by the intelligence," the Senate report said, and in some ways reflected an unwillingness to consider the views of outside analysts.
The report said this close-mindedness was most evident in the cases of high-strength aluminum tubes, which the agency believed Iraq was trying to acquire to use as centrifuges to enrich uranium — a prerequisite for developing nuclear weapons. The committee found that C.I.A. personnel did not invite experts from the Department of Energy to participate in tests on the tubes. When asked why not, an agency official told the committee, "because we funded it. It was our testing. We were trying to prove some things that we wanted to prove with the testing."
The committee found that all of the equipment acquired by Iraq had conventional military or industrial uses, and the tubes in question appeared to be for building rockets.
The report dealt equally harshly with the administration's contention, voiced by President Bush in his State of the Union speech last year, that Iraq had sought to buy yellowcake uranium in Africa.
Administration officials have since conceded that there was not sufficient evidence for such a charge, and the report faults Mr. Tenet for failing to read the president's speech and fact-check it himself.
The committee faulted the C.I.A. for failing to notify the Senate that the agency was conducting its own review of the report from Niger, or to mention that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research asserted that it was based on forged documents. Christopher Marquis (NYT)
Overreaching Conclusions
Before the war, the intelligence community's major conclusions about Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs far exceeded what could be drawn from available intelligence and overstated the judgments of intelligence analysts, the Senate committee concluded in its report on Friday.
The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate stated that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons." But the Senate panel found that conclusion "overstated both what was known and what intelligence analysts judged about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons holdings."
The Senate report also rejected the contention that "all key aspects" of Iraq's offensive biological weapons program had been active before the war. Information reviewed by the committee showed this conclusion was "not supported by the underlying intelligence."
While the intelligence did show that Iraq was renovating or expanding facilities that had been "associated" with Iraq's biological programs and was engaged in research that had biological applications, "few reports suggested specifically that the activity was related" to biological warfare.
The Senate report strongly criticized the handling of information about Iraq's supposed mobile biological weapons facilities provided by a source known as Curveball, finding that the C.I.A. failed to disclose important information about the source's reliability.
In addition, the intelligence community assessment that Mr. Hussein had probably stockpiled 100 metric tons of chemical weapons agents, and perhaps as much as 500 tons, was based on an analytical judgment and not on intelligence reporting, the committee said.
However, the panel found that available intelligence did support a conclusion that biological and chemical weapons "were within Iraq's technological capability" and that Iraq was trying to obtain material that could have been used to produce them. Findings about Iraq's capability to produce and weaponize biological agents were "for the most part supported" by intelligence, the committee found.
PHILIP SHENON
NY Times
[This message was edited by wilheim on July 10, 2004 at 02:30 AM.]
