Katherine Pfleger, Associated Press -- Arab News

WASHINGTON, 6 February 2004 — In his first public defense of prewar intelligence, CIA Director George Tenet said yesterday US analysts never claimed before the war that Iraq posed an imminent threat.

Tenet said analysts had varying opinions on the state of Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and those differences were spelled out in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate given to the White House. That report summarized intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs.

Analysts “painted an objective assessment for our policy makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests, “ he said in a speech at Georgetown University.

“No one told us what to say or how to say it,” Tenet said.

He said that “in the intelligence business, you are never completely wrong or completely right ... When the facts of Iraq are all in, we will neither be completely right nor completely wrong.”

He also noted that the search for banned weapons is continuing and “despite some public statements, we are nowhere near 85 percent finished. “ That was a direct rebuttal to claims made by David Kay, Tenet’s former top adviser in the weapons search.

Since Kay resigned two weeks ago, his statements that Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons didn’t exist at the time of the US invasion have sparked an intense debate over the prewar intelligence the Bush administration used to justify the war.

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction is turning into a major political issue ahead of the presidential election, calling into question the justification for the war as US casualties mount. Republicans in Congress have increasingly been blaming poor intelligence and Tenet, who was originally appointed by President Clinton.

Democrats have said intelligence agencies deserved only part of the blame and have accused the White House of showcasing intelligence that bolstered the case for war, while ignoring dissenting opinions.

Bush was expected to announce another commission this week to review the intelligence community. At least five other inquiries into prewar intelligence are already under way.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., scheduled a meeting yesterday to study a 200-plus-page report compiled by committee staff on the prewar intelligence.

Even as he acknowledged some intelligence shortcomings in Iraq, Tenet listed other work that he said represented great successes. He credited US intelligence on Iran and Libya’s nuclear programs with recent decisions by those countries to cooperate with international arms inspectors.

Tenet agreed with Kay’s comments that the United States didn’t have enough human spies in Iraq and acknowledged that the CIA had not penetrated Saddam’s inner circle. But he said it is strong elsewhere and “a blanket indictment of our human intelligence around the world is dead wrong.”

“We have spent the last seven years rebuilding our clandestine services,” he said.

Tenet credited CIA spies with the arrests of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, purported mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and Asia’s leading terror suspect, Hambali.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended intelligence work at a Senate hearing Wednesday.

“The reality is we have had some wonderful successes, and some of them not public,” Rumsfeld said. “The failures are very visible, and that’s always the case.”

Just as Bush and his aides have backed away from their predictions that weapons would be found, Rumsfeld said he thinks Iraq may have had weapons of mass destruction before US troops invaded and inspectors need more time to search for them.

Tenet acknowledged that many of the agency’s weapons of mass destruction prewar estimates have not been borne out so far. For example, US analysts believed that Saddam’s regime was trying to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program but have found no evidence of that, he said. On chemical and biological weapons, Tenet said analysts believed that Saddam had ongoing programs but had found no evidence of such.