Prewar buildup in Iraq detailed

WASHINGTON -- Defending its prewar claims about Iraq, the White House took the unusual step Friday of releasing excerpts of a classified report that show U.S. intelligence officials advised administration officials last October that Baghdad was still amassing banned weapons and was working to reconstitute its nuclear program.

The excerpts contain some new information -- including language that suggests the CIA and other agencies were more concerned than they have previously acknowledged that the buildup to war might provoke Saddam Hussein to attempt terrorist strikes in the United States.

The report said that Iraq "probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the U.S. homeland if Baghdad feared an attack." It said that Saddam would likely use biological weapons for such strikes and order his intelligence service to carry them out.

The release was part of a new effort by the White House to emphasize its broader case against Iraq and take attention off the now-discredited claim President Bush made in his State of the Union speech that Baghdad was seeking uranium from Africa.

But the newly declassified material underscored some questions about that charge because the text shows that there was considerable doubt in the intelligence community about the uranium allegations before Bush's Jan. 28 speech.

The excerpts also include language that would seem to undercut Bush administration claims before the war that Saddam had links to al- Qaida. The report makes clear the intelligence community believed cooperation with the fanatical terrorist organization would represent an extreme step for Saddam.

"Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al-Qaida" could help him strike America, the report said. Again, the scenario was presented in the context of the build-up to war.

The release of the material was the latest development in a running feud between the CIA and the White House over which side is to blame for Bush's uranium allegation. The White House acknowledged last week that it should never have made the claim because the underlying intelligence was flawed. It was based in part on forged documents.

CIA Director George J. Tenet has acknowledged that the CIA, in vetting the speech, should have ordered the language removed. But in testimony this week on Capitol Hill, CIA officials told senators that the agency raised objections to the language and finally assented only when the White House proposed attributing the charge to British intelligence.

Briefing reporters at the White House Friday, a senior administration official who said he was responsible for the speech- writing process disputed the CIA's version of events.

He said that there were never "any flags raised about the underlying intelligence." He said the allegation was attributed to British intelligence not in an attempt to circumvent CIA objections but as part of a broader effort to connect allegations in the speech to specific sources. The uranium allegation had been included in a British dossier released in October, and the White House says it chose to cite that document rather than a comparable U.S. report that was still highly classified.

Bush was unaware of any concerns about the uranium allegation, the official said. "The president was comfortable at the time, based on the information that was provided." Bush had been briefed on the U.S. intelligence report, but "I don't think he sat down over a long weekend and read every word of it," he said, adding, "the president of the United States is not a fact-checker."

White House officials say that the uranium allegation may yet prove to be true.

The materials released Friday represent eight pages of a 90-page document, called a National Intelligence Estimate, that served as the basis for many of the Bush administration's claims about Saddam. The estimate is supposed to represent a consensus of the CIA and other agencies on key questions -- in this case Iraq's weapons programs.

Much of the excerpted language had already been released in a declassified "white paper" that was drawn from the NIE and made publicly available in October last year. But there are significant differences.

While both versions of the October report assessed that Baghdad possessed banned weapons, the classified text carries additional caveats, including one saying, "We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD programs."

Another key difference is that the white paper made no mention of Iraq's alleged efforts to procure uranium from Africa. The NIE includes the allegations.

In particular, the NIE cites foreign government reports that in early 2001 Niger was working on a deal with Baghdad to deliver "up to 500 tons of yellowcake" uranium. Other reports indicated that Iraq could be seeking uranium from Somalia and Congo.

The Niger information was based on documents obtained by Italian authorities later shown to be forgeries.

The NIE said that "most agencies" believed Iraq to be reconstituting its nuclear program. That finding was based largely on reports that Baghdad was re-establishing its "cadre" of nuclear scientists and assembling magnets, aluminum tubes and other equipment.

Iraq could make a nuclear weapon "within several months to a year," the report concluded, if it were able to acquire fissile material.

But there was vocal disagreement on this point from the State Department's intelligence bureau. In a dissenting view and footnote, the department said that it did not believe the aluminum tubes were for a nuclear program and that the reports on uranium from Africa were "highly dubious."

The excerpts also point to disagreements over prewar claims that Saddam was developing unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver biological weapons. The report notes that intelligence officials in the U.S. Air Force thought the size of the aircraft Iraq was developing made it more likely that their "primary role" would be reconnaissance.

Overall, although the report supports statements by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others that Iraq was restarting its nuclear program, it raises questions about why the White House included the African uranium charge in the State of the Union.

Contributing: Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times

Copyright C 2003 Deseret News Publishing Co.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.