U.S., Certain That Iraq Had Illicit Arms, Reportedly Ignored Contrary Reports
By DOUGLAS JEHL
March 6, 2004
In the two years before the war in Iraq, American intelligence agencies reviewed but ultimately dismissed reports from Iraqi scientists, defectors and other informants who said Saddam Hussein's government did not possess illicit weapons, according to government officials.
The reports, which ran contrary to the conclusions of the intelligence agencies and the Bush administration, were not acknowledged publicly by top government officials before the invasion last March. In public statements, the agencies and the administration cited only reports from informants who supported the view that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction, which the administration cited as a main justification for going to war.
The first public hint of those reports came in a speech on Friday by Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, she said ''indications'' were emerging from the panel's inquiry into prewar intelligence that ''potential sources may have been dismissed because they were telling us something we didn't want to believe: that Iraq had no active W.M.D. programs.''
Other government officials said they knew of several occasions from 2001 to 2003 when Iraqi scientists, defectors and others had told American intelligence officers, their foreign partners or other intelligence agents that Iraq did not possess illicit weapons.
The officials said they believed that intelligence agencies had dismissed the reports because they did not conform to a view, held widely within the administration and among intelligence analysts, that Iraq was hiding an illicit arsenal.
The Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment directly on Ms. Harman's remarks. But an intelligence official said: ''Human intelligence offering different views was by no means discounted or ignored. It was considered and weighed against all the other information available, and analysts made their best judgments.''
The government officials who described the contradictory reports have detailed knowledge of prewar intelligence on Iraq and were critical of the C.I.A.'s handling of the information. Because the information remains classified, the officials declined to discuss the identity of the sources in any detail, but said they believed the informants' views had been dismissed because they challenged the widely held consensus on Iraq's weapons.
''It appears that the human intelligence wasn't deemed interesting or useful if it was exculpatory of Iraq,'' said one senior government official with detailed knowledge of the prewar intelligence.
A second senior government official, who confirmed that account, said the view that Iraq possessed illicit weapons had been ''treated like a religion'' within American intelligence agencies, with alternative views never given serious attention. The officials said they could not quantify the reports.
In a speech at Georgetown University last month, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, acknowledged for the first time that intelligence agencies might have been mistaken about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons. None have been found yet.
Mr. Tenet said it was too soon to make final judgments. But he also defended intelligence analysts' performance, saying that they had not been swayed by political pressure and that ''as intelligence professionals, we go where the information takes us.''
He met Friday morning in a closed session with members of the House intelligence committee, as part of its inquiry into the prewar intelligence. In another closed session on the subject on Thursday, he spent more than four hours with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, issued a statement describing ''a frank and useful exchange.''
Senator Roberts said the committee hoped ''sometime in the next several weeks'' to issue an ''initial report'' based on its inquiry, which has focused on whether findings by intelligence agencies were supported by adequate evidence.
Among the reports that were discounted, the senior government officials said, was at least one account from an Iraqi scientist who said mysterious trailers described by other Iraqi defectors as part of a biological weapons program were for another, benign purpose, which the officials would not describe.
In prewar presentations and documents, including the unclassified version of a National Intelligence Estimate from October 2002 and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the Security Council in February 2003, the intelligence agencies and the administration cited only human intelligence reports supporting the view that the trailers were for biological weapons.
An unclassified report issued in May by the C.I.A., which is still on the agency's Web site, concluded that the trailers had indeed been for biological weapons. But in the months since the war, most American intelligence analysts have come to believe that the trailers were not for that purpose, and were probably for making hydrogen for weather balloons, according to senior government officials. In testimony before Congress late last month, Mr. Tenet said the intelligence community was divided on the issue.
In the past month, some senior intelligence officials have acknowledged that some information from human sources on Iraq was mishandled, including reports based on interviews in early 2002 with an Iraqi defector who later that year was labeled a fabricator by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The information the defector provided was nevertheless included in the administration's statements, including the October 2002 intelligence assessment and Mr. Powell's speech. Intelligence officials have described the inclusion as a mistake.