Monday, December 01, 2003
CIA lacked "specific information"
The US Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged it "lacked specific information" about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction when it compiled an intelligence estimate last year that served to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq.
But it said that and other uncertainties surrounding the case had been fully presented to President George W. Bush and other US policymakers in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a document often referred to by members of the Bush administration as a basis of their claim that Iraq had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN Security Council last February that Saddam Hussein and his regime were "concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction" and that their weapons programs "are a real and present danger to the region and to the world."
However, an explanation issued over the weekend by veteran CIA analyst Stuart Cohen, who was in charge of putting together the 2002 intelligence estimate and currently serves as vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, made clear the case against Iraq, as presented by the CIA behind closed doors, was much less clear-cut and more nuanced.
"Any reader would have had to read only as far as the second paragraph of the Key Judgments to know that as we said: 'We lacked specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD program,'" Cohen wrote in an article posted on the agency's Web site.
Story via August.
posted by chris at 1:28 PM
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