Senate panel fights over blaming CIA

By William Douglas
Knight Ridder Newspapers

	Jay Rockefeller
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WASHINGTON — A new round of partisan finger-pointing over who's to blame for misjudging prewar Iraq erupted yesterday, as the top Democrat on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee said the panel's Republican chairman was trying to make the CIA the fall guy to deflect criticism from the White House.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing a report evaluating why U.S. intelligence exaggerated the threat that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed to U.S. interests. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the panel's chairman, was quoted yesterday as saying the White House was served badly by the CIA, which provided "sloppy" prewar intelligence.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., responded yesterday by saying that Roberts was trying to "lay all of this out on the intelligence community and never get to any other branches of government; in particular the White House and associated high and visible government agencies."

Washington for months has been consumed by an extraordinarily vicious, even by Washington standards, series of efforts by various agencies — including the State and Defense departments, the CIA, the White House and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney — to blame one another for misreading Iraq's prewar capacity to deliver weapons of mass destruction and its ties to al-Qaida.

	Pat Roberts

Perhaps the most noted example was the public identification of a CIA covert officer's name in an effort to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent on a fact-finding mission to Africa but found no evidence to support claims that Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Niger.

Rockefeller stopped short of calling Roberts' views, reported by The Washington Post, an attempted "whitewash" to cleanse the Bush White House of responsibility for prewar errors, but he did say that the Senate panel needs to examine "the possibility of the manipulation or shaping" of intelligence that President Bush cited when justifying war with Iraq.

Roberts issued a statement yesterday, saying the Post article had "mischaracterized" his statements. "The committee has not finished its review of the intelligence and has not reached any final conclusions or finished a report," he said.

A Roberts aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the senator's remarks to the Post weren't meant to be a broad critique of the CIA, but were aimed at specific instances of flawed intelligence work, such as now-debunked claims about Niger sales of uranium to Iraq.

Nevertheless, CIA officials blasted Roberts and defended their work and CIA Director George Tenet.

"It is hard to understand how the committee could come to any conclusions at this point," CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said. "We are perplexed to hear the committee has reached some conclusions, when only Wednesday (Tenet) requested a meeting with chairman Roberts, during which Director Tenet strongly requested an opportunity for intelligence community senior leadership to appear before the full committee to help them understand this important and complex subject."

A senior administration official who agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity said Roberts' CIA comments were issued with Cheney's encouragement. The official said Cheney is trying to shift the blame for the lack of progress in Iraq from the White House to the CIA. The Roberts aide denied that Cheney encouraged Roberts to criticize the CIA.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the official said, also is seeking to blame the CIA, both to deflect blame from the executive branch and to renew his bid for greater Pentagon control over intelligence operations.

Led by Bush and Cheney, senior administration officials repeatedly said in the months leading up to war that intelligence showed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and terrorist connections that made it a gathering threat to its neighbors and to U.S. interests.

Secretary of State Colin Powell used volumes of U.S. intelligence documents and photos to dramatically present to the United Nations the administration's argument for military action against Baghdad.

Several former CIA officers — including Larry Johnson, Vincent Cannistraro and Jim Marcinkowski — told a panel of Democratic senators yesterday that some of their colleagues felt pressured to produce intelligence that supported Bush's rationale to go to war.

The White House repeatedly has denied pressuring the U.S. intelligence community to produce analyses that supported Bush's case. But some intelligence professionals, military officers and diplomatic officials complained in the months before the war that they felt pushed by other senior administration officials to slant analyses.

They also said that pro-war hardliners in the Pentagon and Cheney's office misrepresented or used intelligence selectively to bolster U.S. charges that Saddam was hiding stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, had reconstituted his nuclear-weapons program and was cooperating with al-Qaida.

No conclusive evidence has been found to substantiate those allegations or the administration's contentions that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States, the oil-rich Persian Gulf or other U.S. friends and allies.

Rockefeller and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said the committee needs to investigate beyond the CIA into other top offices, but Roberts has resisted.

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