'US intelligence relied on old data on WMDs'
AFP, Washington
A CIA internal review panel has concluded that US intelligence analysts lacked new, hard information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction after UN inspectors left Iraq in 1998 and relied on data from the early and mid-1990s in the run-up to the Iraq war, The Washington Post reported Friday. The newspaper said the Central Intelligence Agency's findings that the biological, chemical and nuclear programs were still being pursued by the government of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003 were based primarily on this old information. However, despite the fact that the post-1998 evidence was largely circumstantial or "inferential," the panel believes the CIA's conclusion that Saddam continued to have weapons of mass destruction was likely justified, according to the report. "It would have been very hard to conclude those programs were not continuing, based on the reports being gathered in recent years about Iraqi purchases and other activities before the war," the Post quotes Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who heads the four-person review panel appointed in February by CIA Director George Tenet, as saying. Kerr said the prewar intelligence reports given to the Bush administration by the CIA, the Pentagon and State Department contained caveats and disagreements on data underlying some judgments, such as whether Iraq's nuclear program was being reconstituted, according to the paper. But "on the whole, the analysts were pretty much on the mark," it quotes Kerr as saying.
|
|
