WASHINGTON, 11 August 2003 — CIA Director George Tenet defended a controversial intelligence document prepared under his supervision which provided some of the basis for the US-led invasion of Iraq, in a statement in yesterday’s Washington Post.
In a four-page statement published by the daily, Tenet defended the US intelligence community’s warnings on Iraq’s nuclear program contained in the national intelligence estimate (NIE).
“We stand by the judgments in the NIE,” Tenet wrote.
The estimate “demonstrates consistency in our judgments over many years and are based on a decade’s worth of work. Intelligence is an iterative process and as new evidence becomes available we constantly reevaluate,” he said.
Under fire from critics who claimed that Washington had hyped the threat posed by Iraq as a pretext for invading the country, the White House last month in an unusual move released a declassified version of the NIE, to underscore its case that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons.
The NIE on Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, dated October 2002, warned that “if left unchecked, Iraq “probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade,” and added that “if Baghdad acquires sufficient fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year.”
