Tenet Treads Lightly On WMD Claims

CIA chief George Tenet said Tuesday he doesn't believe the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify war in Iraq but declined to say whether he tried to cool U.S. officials' rhetoric about the now-disputed claim Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

"I'm not going to sit here today and tell you what my interaction was … and what I did and didn't do, except that you have to have confidence to know that when I believed that somebody was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it," Tenet told a congressional hearing. "I don't stand up publicly and do it."

The CIA director's comments came at the end of an exchange in which Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., asked whether Tenet privately challenged President Bush and others — and why he didn't speak up publicly — when officials portrayed the threat from Saddam Hussein as more urgent than CIA reports suggested.

"I do the intelligence … they take the intelligence and assess the risk and make a policy judgment," Tenet said.

The Bush administration anchored its case for war in allegations that Iraq possessed deadly biological and chemical arms and an active nuclear weapons program.

Almost a year after the war began, no weapons have been found and little evidence of advanced programs has been reported. U.S. prewar estimates are now the focus of probes by the Senate and House intelligence committees, a presidential commission and the CIA itself.

Kennedy cited several occasions when officials referred to an urgent threat, the possibility of a nuclear attack and other "war monger" descriptions of weapons programs it now appears Saddam didn't have.

Last month, Tenet said in a speech that CIA analysts "never said there was an imminent threat."

"If you're saying there was no immediate threat and you hear … the president, vice president, secretary of defense using that superheated rhetoric, we have to ask what is your responsibility," Kennedy said.

Asked specifically whether he thinks policy makers misrepresented the intelligence facts to justify the war, Tenet said: "No sir, I don't."

Tenet said that besides key intelligence findings, his agency also believed that Saddam made a continuing effort to deceive the world about this weapons and that it was possible he could surprise them with something.

But according to the Los Angeles Times, Tenet also revealed that a controversial Pentagon office had briefed the White House on Iraq intelligence without going through the CIA.

He said the Pentagon's Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, which was formed after Sept. 11 and tried to prove a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, had briefed the offices Vice President Dick Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Tenet said he only recently learned of the prewar briefings. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said the Group's White House briefings included material not presented to the CIA.

No evidence has surfaced to confirm any operational link between Saddam Hussein an al Qaeda. The CIA has refuted claims by some U.S. officials that a link has been proven.

For example, earlier this year Cheney said "there's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government." Tenet said he "did not agree with the way the data was characterized" in the document to which Cheney referred.

"And I will talk to him about it," Tenet said of Cheney. Tenet indicated he had already talked to Cheney about the vice president erroneously saying trailers seized in Iraq probably were biological weapons labs. Analysts doubt they were.

Democrats raised questions about differences between public reports and classified CIA documents.

For example, the 2002 classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq said, "We judge Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating (biological warfare) agents and is capable of quickly producing and weaponizing a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs missiles, aerial sprayer, and covert operatives."

A public report released by the Bush administration repeated that sentence, but added at the end "including potentially against the U.S. homeland."

Meanwhile, in Britain, Greenpeace lost a court bid Wednesday to force the British government to reveal its senior lawyer's advice about the legal justification for war in Iraq.

Lawyers for the environmental group had argued that they needed to know details of the advice to properly defend 14 of the organization's activists, who are facing trespass and criminal damage charges relating to an anti-war protest last year.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's office has consistently rebuffed calls to make the private advice public despite allegations that attorney general Lord Goldsmith altered his view in the weeks leading up to the war.

Goldsmith issued advice publicly on March 17, 2003, that, based on three U.N. resolutions, the use of force against Iraq was legal.

But Greenpeace and media reports allege that this differed from a private briefing that Goldsmith gave to the government a month earlier. They allege that Goldsmith changed his advice after military chiefs sought clarification on the legality of war with Iraq.

Elsewhere, former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix on Tuesday likened the runup to the war in Iraq to a witch hunt, and argued that the subsequent failure to find weapons of mass destruction would dent the public's faith in the U.S. and British governments.

"They were so convinced that there were witches in Iraq that every black cat became proof of it," Blix said. "The tendency was to view any evidence in a more serious light than was the reality."