WASHINGTON — Fiercely defending the intelligence community, CIA Director George J. Tenet on Thursday said his agency never warned President Bush that Saddam Hussein's government posed an "imminent threat," and the top spymaster backed away from several claims about weapons of mass destruction that the White House had used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
In a hastily arranged speech at Georgetown University, Tenet said years of intelligence collection and Hussein's "cheat and retreat" tactics made it "difficult for analysts to come to any other conclusions" than that Baghdad was actively amassing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, even though none have been found.
Despite his defiant posture and impassioned tone, Tenet retreated from the agency's prewar claims on nearly every front. He admitted that the CIA had few if any human sources in Iraq, acknowledged that it may have "overestimated" Hussein's nuclear weapons programs, and said that "we do not know" if Iraq produced biological weapons before the war.
The most damaging disclosure was Tenet's admission for the first time that the CIA had allowed "fabricated" information from an "unreliable" Iraqi defector about suspected mobile germ-weapons labs to appear in two key prewar assessments: Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's dramatic presentation to the United Nations Security Council one year ago Thursday, and the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate provided to members of Congress shortly before they voted to approve the use of force in Iraq.
The administration insisted at the time that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to build more weapons of mass destruction.
An intelligence official said later that the Iraqi National Congress, then an opposition group headed by exile Ahmad Chalabi, had delivered the defector to the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency for debriefing. Although the DIA initially circulated the informant's claims about mobile labs, the Pentagon agency later backtracked and warned the intelligence community that "this individual was possibly fabricating or embellishing his information."
But for reasons still unclear, analysts "didn't notice" the warnings, the official said, and failed to prevent the bogus claims from becoming part of Powell's presentation and the official weapons estimate for Congress.
