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Amid Mounting Criticism, Rumsfeld Defends Iraq Intelligence By Joe Fiorill Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON ― As top U.S. weapons hunter David Kay told lawmakers his teams have “not yet found stocks of weapons” of mass destruction in Iraq — but cannot say for sure that no such weapons were present when the U.S. war in Iraq began — U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday defended controversial prewar intelligence on Iraq’s alleged WMD programs and how the Bush administration used the intelligence (see related GSN story, today). Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing that he has seen nothing that indicates prewar intelligence on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs was “necessarily, in the aggregate, inaccurate.” He added that there was “no debate” at the United Nations before the war “as to whether or not Saddam Hussein had these programs under way.” “The only debate in the U.N. was whether or not you should wait longer and allow another resolution before deciding that the inspectors weren’t finding it,” said Rumsfeld. The defense chief’s comments appeared to be at odds with statements by antiwar parties early this year in the U.N. Security Council. Russian U.N. Ambassador Sergei Lavrov said March 4 that Russia's “own data does not confirm the U.S. charges” about Iraq’s weapons programs. On March 7, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei and U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission head Hans Blix told the council they had found no evidence to support U.S. charges of revived Iraqi weapons programs but needed more time. On March 19, as U.S. troops prepared to enter Iraq, Blix said that “3 1/2 months of work carried out in Iraq have not brought the assurances needed about the absence of weapons of mass destruction” and expressed regret that “no more time is available for our inspections.” Rumsfeld’s comments yesterday came a week after leaders of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee wrote CIA Director George Tenet to criticize last October’s national intelligence estimate and amid increasing questions about how much influence top administration officials had in preparing the document, which administration members cited frequently in making the case for war. Rumsfeld said he has “never seen anything that was perfect” in the area of intelligence and added, in an apparent reference to the format of the national intelligence estimate, “The collective judgment, with a footnote saying, ‘I don’t agree with that,’ ends up getting circulated.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Senior Associate Joseph Cirincione called Rumsfeld’s portrayal of the intelligence “a rewrite of history.” “The October 2002 NIE is notable for two things. It was the NIE with the most dissents, and the most serious dissents, of any NIE in memory, and … it was strikingly different from all Iraq threat assessments that preceded it. So the question is, what went on with that NIE? Who intervened to make that NIE come out the way it did?” Cirincione said. The answer, he said, is that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and the Defense Department’s Office of Special Plans heavily influenced the preparation of the intelligence report. Rumsfeld characterized Kay’s report yesterday as “some sort of an interim report,” adding that U.S. weapons hunters “have a lot of work left to do,” including visits to a number ― described by Rumsfeld as “quite low” ― of “suspect sites” they have not yet visited. “Trying to, you know, make an early decision on it, it seems to me, would be not something that I’d have the confidence in doing,” Rumsfeld said. Asked about a New York Times report that $600 million of the $87 billion the Bush administration is seeking for activities in Iraq is for continuing the WMD search, Rumsfeld said, “It’s classified.” Asked why, he replied, “I don’t classify these things.” In related news, Maj. Gen. David Cone yesterday criticized prewar intelligence about what advancing U.S. troops could expect in a battle for Iraq’s capital. The remarks came as Cone briefed the press on an effort he has led to determine the U.S. military’s “lessons learned” from the Iraq war. “I don’t think the intelligence was good at all in terms of what we expected from an enemy inside the city,” Cone said. Asked about prewar concerns that the tactics of Iraqi forces defending Baghdad could include use of weapons of mass destruction, Cone said U.S. commanders told him that, before arriving in Baghdad, they believed “the question was when they would use it, not if they would use it.”
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