By Mark Mazzetti
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 10, 2004
WASHINGTON — In a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared
before the Iraq war, the CIA hedged its judgments about Saddam Hussein and
weapons of mass destruction, pointing up the limits of its knowledge.
But in the unclassified version of the NIE — the so-called white paper
cited by the Bush administration in making its case for war — those
carefully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt assertions of fact,
according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar
intelligence.
The repeated elimination of qualifying language and
dissenting assessments of some of the government's most knowledgeable experts
gave the public an inaccurate impression of what the U.S. intelligence
community believed about the threat Hussein posed to the United States, the
committee said.
Dedicating a section of its 511-page report to
discrepancies between the two versions of the crucial October 2002 NIE, the
panel laid out numerous instances in which the unclassified version omitted key
dissenting opinions about Iraqi weapons capabilities, overstated U.S. knowledge
about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons and, in one case, inserted
threatening language into the public document that was not contained in the
classified version.
"The intelligence community's elimination of the
caveats from the unclassified white paper misrepresented their judgments to the
public, which did not have access to the classified National Intelligence
Estimate containing the more carefully worded assessments," the Senate panel's
report concluded.
"The fact that the NIE changed so dramatically from
its classified to its unclassified form and broke all in one direction, toward a
more dangerous scenario … I think was highly significant," the committee's
vice chairman, Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), said Friday.
NIEs commonly take months to prepare, but the Iraq report and its
unclassified version were compiled in a matter of weeks, the panel said.
As the Bush administration ratcheted up its case for war in September 2002,
senators on the Intelligence Committee wrote to the director of central
intelligence, George J. Tenet, requesting an NIE about Iraq's weapons programs
and any connections to Al Qaeda. With Congress set to vote on the war
resolution the next month, intelligence officials rushed to produce the
estimate.
But the Senate committee's sharpest criticism of the
unclassified document focused not on changes made in haste but on the systematic
alteration of the classified version.
For example, the panel cited
changes made in the section of the NIE dealing with chemical weapons:
"Although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile," the
classified NIE read, "Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric
tons" of such poisons.
In the unclassified version of the report, the
phrase "although we have little specific information" was deleted. Instead, the
public report said, "Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW
agents."
The Senate report also noted one instance in which a
dissenting view was left out of the unclassified version.
In that
example, the classified NIE stated that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial
vehicles, or UAVs, "probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents."
But in a footnote, the U.S. Air Force's director for intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance said he did not agree.
By eliminating
that footnote from the unclassified version, the panel said, the public NIE "is
missing the fact that [the] … agency with primary responsibility
for technological analysis on UAV programs did not agree with the
assessment."
During a nationally televised speech in October 2002,
President Bush cited the threat of Iraqi drone aircraft being used for terrorist
attacks against the United States. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also
discussed the UAVs in his speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003.
The committee's report describes not just sins of omission, but of
addition.
The classified NIE stated, for instance, that "Iraq has some
lethal and incapacitating BW [biological weapons] agents and is capable
of quickly producing … a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for
delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives."
In
the unclassified version, the words "potentially against the U.S. homeland" are
inserted at the end of the statement.
During a briefing before the
report was released, one committee aide said the Senate panel had asked Tenet
and Stu Cohen — who, as acting chairman of the National Intelligence
Council, oversaw production of the NIE — who was responsible for inserting
those words into the unclassified document.
"They did not know and
could not explain," said the aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A similar degree of mystery surrounds the larger question of exactly how the
classified NIE morphed into its unclassified version.
According to the
committee report, the intelligence community began preparing an unclassified
white paper on Iraq's banned weapons in May 2002, at the request of the National
Security Council.
Months later, as the administration began to make its
public case for war, Congress requested an official NIE. Officials at the
National Intelligence Council decided to merge the white paper with declassified
elements of the NIE to produce the official unclassified version.
Yet
committee staffers said Friday that, after a year of investigating, they were
still trying to get to the bottom of how the key differences between the
classified and unclassified versions came about.
One such difference,
the committee reported, is that the classified version presented intelligence
findings as assessments — usually beginning with the words "we assess
that" — whereas the white paper omitted those words and stated the
assessments as facts.
"We assess that Baghdad has begun renewed
production of mustard, sarin, GF [cyclosarin] and VX," the classified
NIE read, according to the Senate report.
The unclassified white paper
read, "Baghdad has begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents, probably
including mustard, sarin, cyclosarin and VX."
According to the
intelligence committee report, staffers asked intelligence officials why words
like "we judge" and "we assess" were removed during the declassification
process.
They were told that, because officials believed the white
paper would be made public as representing the view of the entire U.S.
government, not simply an intelligence community product, it was more
appropriate to take references to "we" out of the document. This was done,
committee staffers were told, "purely for stylistic reasons."