Tenet Faces More WMD Grilling

Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet faced tough questioning about prewar reports on Iraq before a Senate panel on Tuesday.

Several members of the Senate Armed Services Committee are likely to grill him on the agency's intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and the failure so far to find any.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. last week said Tenet was "silent when it mattered most" in the days leading up to the war. Kennedy can be expected to ask Tenet why he waited until last month to say that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the U.S., especially since administration officials claimed Iraq was a growing nuclear threat.

"Did Tenet fail to convince the policy-makers to cool their overheated rhetoric? Did he even try to convince them?" Kennedy asked.

Iraq's alleged arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, illegal ballistic missiles and nuclear program comprised the main justification for the war. 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.

In a speech at Georgetown University last month, Tenet defended his agency's estimates, saying his analysts "never said there was an imminent threat."

"Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policy-makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests," he said.

"No one told us what to say or how to say it," he added, alluding to allegations by some Democrats that administration officials skewed the CIA's reporting.

The No. 2 Iraqi scientist involved in the secret program said Tuesday that Iraq was three years away from producing a nuclear bomb before the 1991 Gulf War.

Noman Saad Eddin al-Noaimi, a former director-general of Iraq's nuclear program, told The Associated Press said the Iraqis were able to produce less than 2.2 pound) of highly enriched uranium before the program was halted.

It is estimated that a bomb would require at least 22 pounds of the uranium substance.

"Producing the appropriate amount would have required at least two more years, under normal circumstances," he said. "Putting that substance into a weapon could have taken an additional year," he said on the sidelines of a Beirut meeting on the repercussions of the Iraq invasion.

In his speech last month, Tenet said Iraq's weapons research before the Gulf War, which turned out to be more extensive than intelligence had predicted, colored recent CIA estimates.

" … we couldn't forget that in the early 1990s, we saw that Iraq was just a few years away from a nuclear weapon," he said.

"Did the fact that we missed how close Saddam came to acquiring a nuclear weapon in the early 1990s cause us to overestimate his nuclear or other programs in 2002?" Tenet asked.

In the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, Tenet said, the CIA concluded that "Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon and probably would have been unable to make one until 2007 to 2009."

Other U.S. and allied sources have claimed that in 1991, Iraq was even closer than Tenet's estimate of "a few years" to nuclear capability.

The Armed Forces Press Service says "Iraq was within months of producing an enriched-uranium nuclear weapon when the Persian Gulf War started in January 1991," and the Sept. 2002 British dossier on Iraq said that, "In August 1990 Iraq instigated a crash program to develop a single nuclear weapon within a year."

The International Atomic Energy Agency had also estimated Iraq was six to 24 months away from nuclear capability in 1991.

The father of Iraq's nuclear bomb program, speaking publicly for the first time since U.S. forces occupied Baghdad, called Monday for a U.N. probe of what nuclear inspectors knew before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and denied Saddam Hussein had tried to restart his atomic program.

Jafar Dhia Jafar said U.N. inspectors had "reached total conviction" that Iraq was free of nuclear weapons before the U.S.-led invasion yet failed to convey that to the Security Council.

"It was clear that reports of the United Nations to the Security Council should have been clear and courageous," Jafar said. "I believe the United Nations should also investigate ... the facts that were known before the war and why they (nuclear inspectors) did not declare them to the security council."

Jafar spoke during a discussion about the repercussions of the occupation of Iraq organized by the Beirut-based Center for Arab Unity Studies. Speaking mostly on the history and background of Iraq's nuclear program, he presented a paper jointly authored with another prominent Iraqi nuclear scientist denying Iraq had restarted its pursuit of atomic weapons.

"Saddam Hussein issued orders in July 1991 for the destruction of all banned weapons, in addition to the systems to produce them. It was carried by the Special Republican Guard forces," wrote Jafar and al-Noaimi.

"We can confirm with absolute certainty that Iraq no longer possessed any weapons of mass destruction after its unilateral destruction of all its components in the summer of 1991, and did not resume any such activity because it no longer had the foundations to resume such activity," they wrote.

Three days before the invasion last March, Vice President Dick Cheney said Iraq was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons," even though U.N. inspectors had found no such evidence.