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White House Considering Easing Iraqi WMD Hunt
The Bush administration is considering reducing intelligence resources used for the Iraqi WMD hunt and using them instead for counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq, a U.S. official said yesterday (see GSN, Oct. 27). Such a resource shift could help combat the forces behind the persistent attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, officials said. The CIA, however, is concerned about any weakening of the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, they said. “There are competing demands for the services of a finite number of individuals,” a senior U.S. official said. “Obviously, you don’t want to fail to support the security needs in Baghdad, but on the other hand you don’t want to fail to support the weapons hunt,” the official said (Schmitt/Jehl, New York Times, Oct. 29). Former U.S. State Department Intelligence Head Criticizes U.S. Intelligence CommunityMeanwhile, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Carl Ford said yesterday that the U.S. intelligence community failed for years to accurately assess Iraq’s WMD capabilities. The intelligence community “has to bear the major responsibility for WMD information in Iraq and other intelligence failures,” Ford said in interviews with the Los Angeles Times. “We badly underperformed for a number of years … and the information we were giving the policy community was off the mark,” he said. During a press conference yesterday, however, U.S. President George W. Bush defended the quality of prewar intelligence on Iraq. “We took action based upon good, solid intelligence,” Bush said. “It was the right thing to do to make America more secure and the world more peaceful,” he added. CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said yesterday that it was too soon to determine the accuracy of the agency’s claims regarding Iraqi WMD efforts. “It is entirely premature to reach conclusions about the accuracy of prewar judgments about the status of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction efforts. The difficulty in locating highly compartmented, secret weapons programs in a country that was extensively bombed and looted should not be underestimated,” Harlow said. Ford, however, called on the intelligence community to acknowledge its failures as a first step toward improvement. “It’s sort of like the first step in a 12-step program,” he said. “You have to have that moment of clarity to realize that you’ve got a problem. We in the community have not yet accepted that we have a problem. The worst thing, for me, is we could do better. … We can do far better with the people, the leadership and the money we’ve got. It’s the lost opportunities I find troubling,” Ford said. Ford also said the intelligence community could not blame its failures on pressure from the Bush administration. “We push back on political pressure … and the only problem is when there’s a weasel in the intelligence community who does not have the backbone and starts giving the policymakers what they want to hear,” he said (Efron/Miller, Los Angeles Times, Oct. 29). Iraq Moved Weapons of Mass Destruction Prior to War, Intelligence Official SaysRetired Air Force Gen. James Clapper, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and now leader of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said yesterday that he believed Iraq hid elements of its WMD programs before the war, according to Reuters. “I think probably in the few months prior to the onset of combat, there was probably an intensive effort to disperse to private homes, to move documentation and materials out of the country,” Clapper said. The looting that occurred in Iraq after the onset of the war may have been intended as a tactic to hide WMD-related materials, Clapper said. (Reuters/New York Times, Oct. 28). Mapping agency spokesman David Burppe said he could not provide additional documents to support Clapper’s claims (Douglas Jehl, New York Times, Oct. 29).
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