Bush's nose just grows and grows.


In Sketchy Data, White House Sought Clues to Gauge Threat

THE NEW YORK TIMES/ July 20, 2003
This article was reported and written by James Risen, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker.

WASHINGTON, July 19 — Beginning last summer, Bush administration officials insisted that they had compelling new evidence about Iraq's prohibited weapons programs, and only occasionally acknowledged in public how little they actually knew about the current status of Baghdad's chemical, biological or nuclear arms.

Some officials belittled the on-again, off-again United Nations inspections after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, suggesting that the inspectors had missed important evidence. "Even as they were conducting the most intrusive system of arms control in history, the inspectors missed a great deal," Vice President Dick Cheney said last August, before the inspections resumed.

In the fall, as the debate intensified over whether to have inspectors return to Iraq, senior government officials continued to suggest that the United States had new or better intelligence that Iraq's weapons programs were accelerating — information that the United Nations lacked.

"After 11 years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more," President Bush declared in a speech in Cincinnati last October. "And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon."

"Clearly, to actually work, any new inspections, sanctions, or enforcement mechanisms will have to be very different," he added.

Now, with the failure so far to find prohibited weapons in Iraq, American intelligence officials and senior members of the administration have acknowledged that there was little new evidence flowing into American intelligence agencies in the five years since United Nations inspectors left Iraq, creating an intelligence vacuum.

"Once the inspectors were gone, it was like losing your G.P.S. guidance," added a Pentagon official, invoking as a metaphor the initials of the military's navigational satellites. "We were reduced to dead reckoning. We had to go back to our last fixed position, what we knew in '98, and plot a course from there. With dead reckoning, you're heading generally in the right direction, but you can swing way off to one side or the other."

Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, said today that the question of new evidence versus old was beside the point. "The question of what is new after 1998 is not an interesting question," she said. "There is a body of evidence since 1991. You have to look at that body of evidence and say what does this require the United States to do? Then you are compelled to act.

"To my mind, the most telling and eye-catching point in the judgment of five of the six intelligence agencies was that if left unchecked, Iraq would most likely have a nuclear weapon in this decade. The president of the United States could not afford to trust Saddam's motives or give him the benefit of the doubt," she said.

In a series of recent interviews, intelligence and other officials described the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House as essentially blinded after the United Nations inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998. They were left grasping for whatever slivers they could obtain, like unconfirmed reports of attempts to buy uranium, or fragmentary reports about the movements of suspected terrorists.

President Bush has continued to express confidence that evidence of weapons programs will be found in Iraq, and the administration has recently restructured the weapons hunt after the teams dispatched by the Pentagon immediately after the war confronted an array of problems on the ground and came up mostly empty-handed.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offered a nuanced analysis to Congress last week about the role that American intelligence played as the administration built its case against Mr. Hussein.

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder," he said. "We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light, through the prism of our experience on Sept. 11."

Richard Kerr, who headed a four-member team of retired C.I.A. officials that reviewed prewar intelligence about Iraq, said analysts at the C.I.A. and other agencies were forced to rely heavily on evidence that was five years old at least. . . .




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