WASHINGTON, 11 March 2004 — CIA Director George Tenet faced tough questioning about pre-Iraq war reports as he defended the Bush administration’s decision to declare war on Iraq before a Senate panel on Tuesday.
In a tense give-and-take, several members of the Senate Armed Services Committee grilled the CIA chief, who again defended US intelligence agencies from critics who said the CIA and other agencies misread intelligence that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
In a sharp exchange with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, Tenet said he did not believe intelligence was misused by the Bush administration to launch the war with Iraq.
Kennedy then asked is Tenet had ever told the president or vice president “that they were overstating the case.”
“If there are areas where I thought someone said something they shouldn’t say, I talked to them about it,” the CIA director responded. Tenet said he took the blame for the now discredited allegations that Iraq tried to purchase uranium in Africa, which Bush had alluded to during his 2003 State of the Union address
Kennedy continued his assault: “When you see this intelligence you provide being misrepresented, misstated by the highest authorities, when do you say no?”
The CIA director shot back: “I’m not going to sit here and tell you what my interaction was” with the president or vice president. “When I believed someone was misconstruing intelligence, I stood up and said something about it. I don’t stand up in public and do it. I do my job the way I did it in two administrations,” referring to his four years as CIA director during the Clinton administration.
Tenet then admitted that “sometimes” language used by policymakers in public “doesn’t uniquely comport” with the complex, more nuanced language of the intelligence community.
Referring to a classified Pentagon intelligence report leaked in October 2003 that suggested there were operation links between Saddam Hussein’s government and Al-Qaeda, Tenet said the CIA “did not agree with the way the data was characterized in the document.”
The relation between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, only included “contacts, training and safe haven,” said Tenet.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, and ranking member of the committee, told Tenet American credibility was damaged by what he called “the intelligence fiasco” of not finding WMD in Iraq, which was why the US invaded Iraq. “Initiating the war on the basis of faulty or exaggerated intelligence is a very serious matter,” Levin said. “Life and death decisions are based on intelligence. The fact that intelligence assessment before the war were so wildly off the mark should trouble all Americans.”
