CIA denies Iraq posed an imminent threat

The director of the CIA, George Tenet, has contradicted claims made, or implied, by the Bush Administration that Iraq had posed an imminent danger to the west before the United States-led invasion last March. Intelligence reports had "never said there was an imminent threat", he said.

Tenet, in his first public defence of the intelligence agency, said analysts had various opinions about the state of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes and that these were clearly spelled out in a report handed to the White House in October 2002.

That report, the National Intelligence Estimate, included 40 caveats and dissents from various analysts. "In the intelligence business, you are never completely wrong or completely right. When the facts of Iraq are all in, we will neither be completely right nor completely wrong," he said.

Tenet said the intelligence agencies had been asked to say if Iraq had chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

"We concluded that in some of these categories Iraq had weapons, and that in others, where it did not have them, it was trying to develop them," he said.

"Let me be clear: analysts differed on several important aspects of these programmes and those debates were spelled out in the estimate. They never said there was an imminent threat. Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policy makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programmes that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests. No one told us what to say or how to say it."

The US intelligence community has been roundly condemned for its alleged "failures" as the White House has sought to shift responsibility over its decision to invade Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction have been discovered, and David Kay, the man who until recently led the US search, said last week he believed no stockpiles existed and that "we were all wrong".

While various anonymous intelligence officials have retaliated by saying the information they provided was as accurate as it could be, Tenet's speech at Georgetown University in Washington DC, was the first time the CIA's leadership has defended its analysts.

Tenet has a close relationship with George Bush, but his remarks will be seized on by critics of the Administration who claim that intelligence was cherry-picked by officials who used various elements to build a case to support their desire to oust Saddam Hussein. Greg Thielmann, a former intelligence official with the State Department, called such a practice "faith-based intelligence gathering".

The Administration claimed recently that it never said Saddam was an imminent threat. The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, last week dismissed the issue of WMD by saying the media - not the Bush Administration - had chosen to use the word 'imminent' to describe the Iraqi threat.

But on May 7 last year, the then White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, was asked: "Didn't we go to war because we said WMD were a direct and imminent threat to the US?"

He replied: "Absolutely."

In October 2002, the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said: "Ask yourself this question: was the attack that took place on 11 September an imminent threat the month before or two months before or three months before or six months before? When did the attack on 11 September become an imminent threat? Now, transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a month ... So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?"

President Bush on Thursday defended his war on Iraq as the "right thing to do". In his clearest acknowledgment of problems with the intelligence that underpinned the case for war, Bush said in a speech: "We have not yet found the stockpiles of weapons that we thought were there."

But, speaking shortly after Tenet had defended his agency, Bush added: "Knowing what I knew then and knowing what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq."

In Iraq, violence again underlined the difficulties Washington faces installing a stable democracy in a country riven by ethnic and religious tension.

An attempt to assassinate the most influential cleric among the long-oppressed Shiite Muslim majority failed, aides said in the holy city of Najaf. The reclusive 73-year-old ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, was unhurt after gunmen fired on his car.

The incident was the latest in some occasionally bloody assaults on Shiite leaders since the US invasion and followed suicide bomb attacks against leaders of the Kurdish minority in the north on Sunday which killed more than 100 people.

Details of the attack on Sistani were unclear. In recent weeks, the cleric has spoken out against US proposals for transferring power to an Iraqi government by July 1. He wants direct elections to be held rather than the US plan for a system of indirect regional caucuses.

His words carry great weight with the 60 per cent Shiite majority and his opposition has thrown into question the timetable for handing over sovereignty.

Some in the Sunni minority, many of whom remain loyal to the now imprisoned Saddam and mount daily attacks on US forces, fear democracy could spell Shiite domination.

The assassination attempt comes days before UN experts are due to arrive to assess the feasibility of holding early elections along the lines that Sistani has demanded.

A US Army spokesman reported that a soldier was killed and another wounded on Thursday in a mortar attack on Baghdad airport and a nearby US military installation.

- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq