WASHINGTON — The beleaguered CIA faces new criticism in an internal report submitted this week by a veteran officer, who found serious fault with the agency's analysis on Iraq and said he believed intelligence officials had not come to grips with the causes or scope of the failure.
After spending three months reviewing virtually every piece of raw intelligence that went into the CIA's assessments on Iraq since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Richard J. Kerr, the former deputy director of the agency, said he found failings in the way the data were analyzed and presented, and gaps in the underlying intelligence.
"It is very hard to see [the pre-war analysis on Iraq] as anything but a failure in terms of the specifics that we provided" to policymakers, Kerr said in a telephone interview with The Times. He said he submitted a report of his findings to CIA Director George J. Tenet this week that in many respects echoes the criticism raised by David Kay, who resigned last week as head of the U.S. weapons search team in Iraq.
Kerr emphasized that Iraq was an extremely difficult target, and that many of the intelligence community's judgments were understandable, even if they were wrong. Kerr, like Kay, said he found no evidence that analysts shaded their estimates to support the Bush administration's case for war.
But Kerr challenged some of Kay's broader criticisms, saying he did not believe the former weapons inspector was qualified to pass judgment on whether the intelligence system needs wholesale restructuring or reform.
Even as he came to the CIA's defense on certain points, Kerr said that, overall, the agency has not owned up to fundamental problems exposed by the failure to find banned weapons stocks in Iraq.
"They're going to have to face up to it and deal with it in a direct way, and I don't think they have," Kerr said. "I don't think they have systematically looked at how they did this, at this whole problem, looking at the lessons and trying to understand the strengths and shortcomings" of their assessments on Iraq.
Kerr's comments were echoed by members of Congress, who said they were becoming increasingly impatient with the agency's refusal to acknowledge that its assessments on Iraq were fundamentally flawed.
"They're in denial," said Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "It's critically important for the national security challenges of the future that these problems get fixed. And I have seen no evidence that they are owning up to it."
