White House releases Iraq documents

Intelligence paper confirms longtime doubts on uranium

WASHINGTON, July 18 — Responding to allegations that it falsified some of its case for war with Iraq, the Bush administration on Friday released parts of an intelligence assessment from October that cited “compelling evidence” that Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. But the document included a notation from the State Department calling an assertion at the center of the controversy “highly dubious.”

THE WHITE HOUSE has been under pressure to explain how a sentence accusing Iraq of seeking uranium from Africa made its way into the president’s State of the Union address in January. The accusation, which later turned out to involve the West African nation of Niger, has since been discredited.
CIA Director George Tenet accepted responsibility for allowing the president to make the false accusation, saying his agency approved the sentence in reviewing the final draft of the speech. But NBC and other news organizations have detailed how the CIA had serious reservations about the allegation and tried as long as three months in advance to have it removed from other presidential addresses.
The documents released Friday, excerpts from the intelligence community’s October National Intelligence Estimate, speak generally of the Iraqi threat.
“Although we assess that [former Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them,” the document’s “key judgments” conclude. “Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that UNSCOM [U.N. weapons commission] inspectors departed — December 1998.”
“If left unchecked,” it says, Baghdad “probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.”
But the report is studded with qualifiers and notations of disputed intelligence about a wide range of the evidence the Bush administration used to contend that Iraq posed an extraordinary threat that needed to be addressed immediately.

For example, while it states that “Iraq does not yet have a
nuclear weapon or sufficient material to make one but is likely to have a weapon by 2007 to 2009,” that assessment is offered as being supported with only “moderate confidence.” Other accusations cited by the administration are listed as being offered with “low confidence” — including the key contention that Iraq would ever use chemical or biological weapons at all, even in desperation.

CHEMICAL, BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS
The document does lay out a strong case for the administration’s assertions that Iraq was seeking at least to resume production of such banned weapons, however. The most immediate threat is a stockpile of chemical weapons that Iraq had already begun producing: the nerve gases mustard, sarin, cyclosarin and VX, it says.
“Although we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW [chemical weapons] stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons (MT) and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW agents — much of it added in the past year,” the report says.

It says that while Iraq’s production capacity was probably more limited that it had been before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the quality and shelf life of its VX gas were probably higher than ever before.
Production of biological agents is not as advanced, the document concludes, but Iraq is “capable of quickly producing and weaponizing a variety of agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives.”
“Chances are even that smallpox is part of Iraq’s offensive BW [biological weapons] program,” it says.

CLAIM CALLED ‘HIGHLY DUBIOUS’
Even though Bush and numerous other U.S. officials asserted before the war that such weapons posed an imminent threat, the report stresses, in boldface type, that the intelligence community has “low confidence” in its assessment of when and how Saddam might use such weapons of mass destruction.
And it declares that “Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW [conventional and biological weapons] against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington with a stronger cause for making war.” That sentence, too, is stressed in boldface.

Meanwhile, on the key question at the heart of the discredited allegation in Bush’s State of the Union address, the document also appears to offer little support.
While it does mention reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from three African countries — Niger, Somalia and “possibly” Congo — it does so in the main body of the assessment, not the “key judgments,” and notes that those reports were unsubstantiated. Moreover, it includes a footnote from the State Department that says “claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are ... highly dubious.”
The Africa allegation is not mentioned among the document’s “key judgments” because it was not substantiated well enough, officials who worked on the report told NBC News’ Carl Rochelle on Friday.
The State Department was also allowed to insert a longer passage saying it doubted that Saddam was pursuing an “integrated and comprehensive” program to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program.
The State Department’s Office of Intelligence and Research noted that some of Iraq’s activities were highly suspicious. “The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case,” it said.
Furthermore, the intelligence assessment also appears to call into question Bush’s accusation that Saddam could try to help arm the al-Qaida terrorist network with chemical or biological weapons, saying that it had “low confidence” in that scenario.
NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell reported Friday that some U.S. intelligence officials had been concerned about the White House’s strong attempt to defend its position in the past week. The allegation of possible links between Saddam and al-Qaida had been one of the prime arguments the administration used to persuade Congress to authorize the war in Iraq, and the intelligence officials feared that public acknowledgment of the low level of confidence in that conclusion could be embarrassing.

DOUBTS OVER BUSH’S CASE
The controversy over Bush’s claim about uranium has undermined the administration’s efforts to quiet rising doubts about his justifications for going to war. The United States said military action was justified, in part, because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but no such weapons have been found.
The discredited intelligence cited in Bush’s address is a series of letters purportedly between officials of Iraq and Niger. The letters indicated that Niger would supply uranium to Saddam’s government in a form that could be refined for nuclear weapons.
The CIA acknowledged last week that it had its doubts about the information, but Bush administration officials repeatedly sought to include the assertion in public statements aimed at vilifying Iraq, sources told NBC News.
The CIA sometimes succeeded in getting the information removed from such statements, the sources said. Most notably, Tenet himself persuaded the White House to strike it from a speech Bush gave in Cincinnati in October, fully three months before he repeated it in his State of the Union address.