CIA Whites Out Controversial Estimate on Iraq Weapons;
The Main Subject of Today's Senate Intelligence Report Remains Largely Secret;
Agency Censors Document Despite Public CIA Speeches, Testimony, Statements
Three versions of the report on Iraq were prepared, all of them concluding
that Saddam was a major threat. But the first, long, classified one was peppered
with reservations. A declassified version that was given to Congress erased
most of the doubts. The even shorter public version had no caveats at all.
Washington
D.C., 22 July 2004 - The CIA has decided to keep almost entirely secret the
controversial October 2002 CIA intelligence estimate about Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction that is the subject of today's Senate Intelligence Committee
report, according to the CIA's June 1, 2004 response to a Freedom of Information
Act request from the National Security Archive.
The CIA's response included a copy of the estimate, "NIE 2002-16HC, October 2002, Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction," consisting almost entirely of whited-out pages. Only 14 of the 93 pages provided actually contained text, and all of the text except for the two title pages and the two pages listing National Intelligence Council members had previously been released in July 2003. At that time, CIA responded to the first round of controversy over the Niger yellowcake story by declassifying the "Key Findings" section of the estimate and a few additional paragraphs.
The CIA's censorship of the estimate mirrors its apparent treatment of the Senate's own report. The Senate Intelligence Committee had previously noted, in a 17 June 2004 press release, that "The Committee is extremely disappointed by the CIA's excessive redactions to the report." In the report released today, the CIA's censorship includes the entire discussion sections that follow the Committee's conclusions that the CIA misled Secretary of State Colin Powell for his February 2003 United Nations speech (pages 253-257), and that the CIA's unclassified presentation of its Iraq WMD findings in October 2002 misled the public by leaving out the caveats, hedged language, and dissents in the underlying intelligence (pages 295-297).
The
estimate has been the subject of multiple public speeches, statements and testimony
by CIA and other intelligence community officials -- even more of which is
published in today’s Senate report. These include public statements by
CIA director George Tenet on 11 July 2003 and 11 August 2003, Tenet's Georgetown
speech of 5 February 2004, and NIC vice-chairman Stuart Cohen's statement of
28 November 2003.
The Department of Energy categorically refuted the claim that the Iraqis were working on nuclear weapons in April 2001, 16 months before Cheney's VFW speech, according to the Senate report. The CIA knew it, the Defense Department knew it, the State Department knew it. But these dissenting views did not make it into the intelligence estimate.
The Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) today summed up the committee's 511-page report as follows: "[T]oday we know these assessments were wrong. And, as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available evidence." National Security Archive director Thomas Blanton commented, "The CIA's continued secrecy claims on a document that has been widely and publicly discussed by top CIA officials, and now by the Senate, is wrong, unreasonable, and largely unsupported by the available evidence."