Iraq-"Evidence" : "Outdated, "Fragmentary" and "Circumstantial"

Bush officials defend Iraq intelligence

CNN -Monday, September 29, 2003

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Bush administration officials used Sunday's talk shows to shrug off criticism that going to war with Iraq was based on outdated, "fragmentary" and "circumstantial" evidence, as was asserted in a letter to the CIA director from the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee...

...The letter to CIA Director George Tenet was sent last week by Rep. Porter Goss of Florida, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Jane Harman of California, the committee's ranking Democrat.

The committee spent the past several months going through 19 volumes of classified material Bush officials used to make their case for war with Iraq, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

Porter and Harman told Tenet they found "significant deficiencies" in the U.S. intelligence community's ability to collect fresh intelligence on Iraq after U.N. weapons inspectors left in 1998, the Post reported.

They said intelligence agencies instead relied on "past assessments" and "some new 'piecemeal' intelligence" that "were not challenged as a routine matter," the Post reported.

From the WP article

...The committee reviewed the underlying information used by U.S. intelligence agencies to write a classified October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. The NIE was the most comprehensive assessment of Iraq available to lawmakers before the war, and many based their approval of Bush's war resolution on it.

The letter acknowledges one sharp difference between the two committee leaders. Harman, the letter indicated, believes the NIE judgments "were deficient with regard to the analysis and presentation." Goss believes the judgments were not deficient and were properly couched to reflect the incomplete nature of the intelligence. A congressional source said Goss "does not believe that [the intelligence] community's judgments were inaccurate."

As to Iraq's ties to terrorists, the committee scrutinized three volumes of data and found "substantial gaps" in credible information from human sources that would have allowed U.S. intelligence agencies "to give policymakers a clear understanding of the nature of the relationship." Instead, the agencies had a "low threshold" or "no threshold" on using information the intelligence community obtained on Iraq's alleged ties to al Qaeda.

"As a result, intelligence reports that might have been screened out by a more rigorous vetting process made their way to the analysts' desks, providing ample room for vagary to intrude," the letter states. The agencies did not clarify which of their reports "were from sources that were credible and which were from sources that would otherwise be dismissed in the absence of any other corroborating intelligence."

Goss and Harman were particularly critical of the underlying intelligence used to conclude that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program.

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney still links Iraq to 9/11 and contends that an Iraqi agent and "hijacker" Mohammad Atta met in Prague before the attack.

The report was made first public in the british Hollinger Paper "Daily Telegraph". One of their directors is PNAC-member and NeoCon Richard Perle.

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