Kennedy Slams CIA Chief

CIA Director George Tenet must come clean with Congress and explain why he waited until last month to "set the record straight" that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United State in the months leading up to the war, a leading Senate Democrat said Friday.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, in remarks prepared for delivery, said Tenet must explain why he never corrected President Bush and others in the administration when they warned of a nuclear threat building in Iraq.

"Where was the CIA Director when the vice president was going nuclear about Saddam going nuclear?" said Kennedy in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. "Did Tenet fail to convince the policy-makers to cool their overheated rhetoric? Did he even try to convince them?"

In a speech last month, Tenet said Saddam Hussein's regime posed a danger, but that analysts had varying opinions about whether Iraq possessed chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. He said that information was passed on to the White House.

The analysts, said Tenet, "never said there was an imminent threat." But while he has distanced himself from the administration's assertions of an urgent threat in Iraq, Tenet has never said the White House distorted the intelligence.

Kennedy is a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, where Tenet is scheduled to testify Tuesday. During that appearance, Kennedy said, the CIA director will have the opportunity to explain "why he was so silent when it mattered most — in the days and months leading up to the war."

A Democratic appointee named to the CIA post by then-President Clinton, Tenet has been on the hot seat for months as Congress has questioned the quality of the intelligence on Iraq and the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction stockpiles were a major justification for the U.S-led invasion. But in nine months of searching, the U.S. Iraq Survey Group has yet to find evidence of actual stockpiles.

In January, outgoing Survey Group chief David Kay told a Senate hearing that, "the efforts that had been directed to this point have been sufficiently intense that it is unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons" in Iraq.

Kay pointed to weapons-related programs in Iraq that violated United Nations resolutions, particularly on long-range ballistic missiles. But he cited no evidence of any advanced program to make biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

Now, the Bush administration's case for war is under investigation by a special presidential commission, the House and Senate intelligence committees and internal and external CIA probes.

A separate FBI probe is examining forged evidence on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Niger. The Justice Department is investigating who leaked the name of a CIA officer married to a former U.S. diplomat who criticized the White House case for war.

In the months since major fighting ended, several theories have emerged to explain why intelligence on Iraq was so far off target. It's possible Saddam was bluffing to try to prevent an attack, or that his own scientists lied to him. Iraqi defectors may have had a motive to embellish what they told U.S. intelligence.

Others note that when U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998, the flow of information was curtailed. That meant there was little to offset the working assumption that Saddam would seek new weapons.

Some Democrats charge that the Bush administration exaggerated the evidence against Iraq. The Senate Intelligence Committee has expanded its review of to examine whether the administration accurately described the information it had.

There were differences between how classified CIA reports and public presentations described Iraq's capabilities.

The CIA's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, drafted in October 2002, revealed doubts by some intelligence agencies about the extent of its nuclear program, the purpose of work its on unmanned aircraft, its doctrine for using WMD and the circumstances under which Saddam might partner with al Qaeda.

Administration officials rarely, if ever, hinted at those doubts.

And when Mr. Bush and aides in January 2003 mentioned an allegation that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa, it flew in the face of repeated efforts by the agency to keep the charge — which was not substantiated — out of the case for war.

A report this week from United Nations inspectors indicates that Iraq destroyed most of its known chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles years before the United States invaded last March.

It says that during inspections in late 2002 and early 2003, "No evidence of either current or recent development or production of proscribed munitions was uncovered."

However, inspectors did see some weapons of mass destruction munitions that it knew about, or that the Iraqis showed them. And there were also small batches of items that may have been related to weapons of mass destruction; those are under review.

That means that "residual munitions from the former Iraqi chemical and biological weapons program may be found in the future," the report notes.

During last year's inspections, inspectors destroyed several Al Samoud missiles because they violated range restrictions and got rid of a handful of chemical weapons shells and biological growth media, which Iraq had previously declared.

U.N. inspectors left Iraq shortly before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. The report notes that because inspectors were forced out, "the disposition of 25 additional missiles, 38 warheads, six launchers, six command vehicles and 326 missile engines designated by UNMOVIC for destruction remains unknown to UNMOVIC."