NY Times article. The CIA isn't going to be whitewashed by partisans in congress looking to scapegoat them.
C.I.A. Disputes Accusations That Its Prewar Conclusions on Iraq Arms Were Flawed
By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: October 25, 2003
WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 ? The Central Intelligence Agency responded angrily on Friday to new Congressional criticism of its handling of prewar intelligence about Iraq's suspected illicit weapons program. At a briefing at C.I.A. headquarters, four senior intelligence officials said that a top-secret internal review now underway had found no evidence of faulty work.
"What it has shown us is that the judgments were not only sound, they were very sound, and backed up by more than one source," a senior intelligence official said of the review, which is being conducted under orders from George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence.
The briefing was organized in response to a report in The Washington Post that said the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was preparing to issue a report saying that intelligence agencies made serious errors of judgment in their prewar conclusion that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program.
In an angry public statement, the C.I.A. spokesman, Bill Harlow, said that any such finding would be premature. Mr. Harlow said that top intelligence officials had not yet been given an opportunity to share their own findings with members of the intelligence committee.
"The committee has yet to take the opportunity to hear a comprehensive explanation of how and why we reached our conclusions," the statement said. Congressional officials said that the detailed review by the Senate committee had indeed turned up indications of serious errors. But Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is the panel's chairman, issued a statement saying that the committee was nowhere near to completing its review and that it would hear from Mr. Tenet and others before reaching any findings.
The senior intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as they outlined findings from a 405-page review being conducted by the National Intelligence Council, said David Kay, the American heading the search for illicit weapons in Iraq, would ultimately determine if the C.I.A. had been right.
"We don't think what we did was deficient, we don't think it was sloppy, and we're waiting to see what David finds to see whether we got it right," a senior official said. In an interim report this month, Mr. Kay said his team had not yet found any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in Iraq. The search is to be completed sometime next year.
Over the course of two hours, the senior intelligence officials sought to rebut comments by Senator Roberts and others claiming that the intelligence agencies' conclusions in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate had been based on incomplete and circumstantial evidence.
"When you get all done parsing this, what you find is a compelling case that no reasonable person could have concluded anything other than what we have" about Iraq's weapons program, based on the information available at the time, a second senior intelligence officials said.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's review is the most extensive effort by Congress now underway to reconcile the failure to find illicit weapons in Iraq with unambiguous claims by the administration and intelligence agencies that Iraq had at least chemical and biological weapons in its arsenal before the American invasion in March. The review is expected to form the basis of a public report that Republicans who control the committee hope to issue later this year.
But Congressional officials said the timing and nature of the conclusions may be affected by opposition from Democrats. The Democrats say the committee still has not been able to review evidence that might shed light on the possible misuse of intelligence by Bush administration officials, as opposed to errors made by intelligence analysts.
The Democrats fear that Senator Roberts and other Republicans on the panel want to blame the C.I.A. for producing faulty intelligence on Iraq to shield President Bush and his top advisers from charges that they exaggerated the Iraqi threat.
The nature of the committee's findings was first reported in Friday's editions of The Washington Post, which attributed to Senator Roberts a statement that the review was "95 percent complete."
But by late afternoon, after the C.I.A. and the ranking Democrat on the committee, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, issued statements on Friday questioning how the panel could have reached such a conclusion, Senator Roberts said that his statements had been mischaracterized.
"The committee has not finished its review of the intelligence and has not reached any final conclusions or finished a report," Senator Roberts said. He said he had agreed that Mr. Tenet "should have an opportunity" to speak to the committee "before the report is finalized."
Still, a congressional official who was authorized to speak about the highly classified review said on Friday that "some initial concerns and issues" that have emerged from the committee review "may not be positive for the intelligence community."
Senator Roberts has said that he is deeply troubled by signs that intelligence agencies made mistakes in their prewar findings, most notably in an October 2002 intelligence estimate produced over a period of less than three weeks at the request of the Senate intelligence committee.
Congressional officials reflecting the view of the committee's Republicans have said that its review had concluded that many of the findings reached by the C.I.A. and other agencies in that document were unfounded and based on circumstantial and contradictory evidence. But Senator Rockefeller told reporters on Capitol Hill on Friday that the review was "far from complete" and that a committee report "cannot possibly be finished before the end of the year."
In a hint of the partisan discord on the committee, Senator Rockefeller said he believed that Senator Roberts "wants to put this to bed as soon as possible," while he himself believed that the review should be completed "honorably and fairly."
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