Bush Aides Deny Effort to Slant Data on Iraq
Arms
June 9, 2003
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, June 8 - President Bush's top foreign policy
advisers insisted today that all of the evidence available
to them starting last October pointed to efforts by Saddam
Hussein to revive his weapons programs. They dismissed as
"revisionist history" charges that intelligence had been
twisted to justify an attack on Iraq.
The comments today by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, were
part of a coordinated effort by the White House to quell
questions about whether they had exaggerated the threat
posed by Mr. Hussein. But the arguments that they put
forward varied somewhat from the explanations that senior
officials offered to reporters a few weeks ago and appeared
to open the possibility that, in the end, American forces
might find that Mr. Hussein had several development
programs under way, but few or no weapons ready for use.
Mr. Bush appeared to be edging toward that direction on
Thursday, when he told troops at the United States Central
Command in Qatar that mobile biological laboratories found
in Iraq showed that Mr. Hussein was "capable" of producing
biological weapons. That is somewhat different from saying
that he possessed chemical and biological weapons, the
argument that Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made
repeatedly before the war.
Today, Ms. Rice argued that the administration made the
best judgment it could and that a succession of central
intelligence directors had made the same judgments as far
back as 1996.
"Successive C.I.A. directors, successive administrations,
have known that we had every reason to judge that he had
weapons of mass destruction," Ms. Rice said on the NBC News
program "Meet the Press." She said that if the C.I.A. had
come to a different conclusion, it would have constituted a
failure to "connect the dots," a reference to the term used
to question why the agency did not put together evidence
that a terror attack was in the works before Sept. 11,
2001.
"The fact is this was a program that was built for
concealment," Ms. Rice said. "We've always known that. We
have always known that it would take some time to put
together a full picture of his weapons of mass destruction
programs."
Mr. Powell and Ms. Rice did not repeat the argument that
many in the administration had made privately in recent
weeks - that Mr. Hussein had chemical "precursors" and
biological agents but kept them in nonweaponized form so
that they would not arouse the suspicions of United Nations
inspectors. Those same officials went on to tell reporters,
before and during Mr. Bush's Middle East trip, that Mr.
Hussein did not have time between the withdrawal of the
inspectors and the start of the war to put together the
components into weapons.
Both officials disputed suggestions that the administration
had exaggerated intelligence to build a larger coalition,
or to win domestic support for a war. They both said it
would take more time to uncover the evidence of Iraq's
weapons efforts - the time they were unwilling to extend to
United Nations inspectors in March. Interviews with
scientists and others are proceeding, they said, and
another 1,300 American experts are now joining the search.
But it is unclear how much time Ms. Rice and Mr. Bush have
before a number of Congressional inquiries begin, and other
nations begin to question American credibility.
The crucial document Ms. Rice cited was the October 2002
"National Intelligence Estimate," which was the basis for
administration statements that Mr. Hussein possessed
proscribed weapons.
That intelligence estimate bore the stamp of George J.
Tenet, the director of central intelligence. Today, White
House officials appeared to be subtly shifting the issue
from whether they twisted conclusions to what the C.I.A.
said as it prepared the estimate, a consensus document that
is supposed to reflect the conclusions of competing
intelligence services.
The document noted the findings of inspectors, before their
withdrawal from Iraq in 1998, of missing stores of chemical
weapons, biological precursors and equipment.
Mr. Powell, appearing on Fox News, noted that the mobile
biological laboratories found by American forces bore great
resemblance to those he described to the United Nations in
February. "I would put before you exhibit A, the mobile
biological labs that we have found," he said. `Now, people
are saying, well, are they truly mobile biological labs?
Yes, they are."
So far, however, there has been no evidence that the labs
were ever put into use in producing the critical materials
for biological weapons.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company