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WASHINGTON - In a formal acknowledgment of
the obvious, the CIA has issued a classified report revising
its prewar assessments on Iraq and concluding that Baghdad abandoned
its chemical weapons programs in 1991, according to intelligence
officials familiar with the document.
The report marks the first time the CIA officially
has disavowed its prewar judgments, and is one in a "series"
of updated assessments the agency is producing as part of
a belated effort to correct its record on Iraq's alleged
weapons programs, officials said.
For an agency that prides itself on providing
the latest intelligence to policymakers, even the title of
the new report reads like a year-old headline: "Iraq: No
Large-Scale Chemical Warfare Efforts Since Early 1990s."
But the CIA's decision to distribute the document in classified
channels underscores the awkwardness the agency faces as
it continues to reconcile its prewar reporting to postwar
realities in Iraq. Before the war, the CIA asserted that
Iraq stockpiled biological weapons and that it was reconstituting
its nuclear weapons program.
A U.S. intelligence official stressed that the
document is "not a high-level report," meaning it was designed
to supplant outdated assessments still on classified computer
networks, and was never meant to be called to the attention
of President Bush or other senior government officials.
"It's basically updating the books," the official
said, "so the information on the shelf is the most current."
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added
that the report was the product of internal agency efforts
to identify and correct mistakes made in the prewar analysis
on Iraq.
Current and former intelligence officials
described it as a highly unusual step for the CIA .
"It's stunning that they would actually put
on paper a reversal,"said one intelligence official of previous
intelligence estimates. The official had not reviewed the
document.
Richard Kerr, a former senior CIA official who
was hired by the agency to conduct an internal review of
its analytic tradecraft last year, said he couldn't recall
the agency ever issuing such a revisionist report on any
subject.
"But the situation is rather unique," Kerr said,
noting that the postwar reality in Iraq has made the agency's
failings painfully obvious. "Ordinarily, you're never proven
wrong in a clean, neat way."
Indeed, the new report was based largely on
the findings by the Iraq Survey Group, a CIA-led team of
weapons experts that scoured the country for more than a
year without finding clear evidence of active illegal weapons
programs.
U.S. intelligence officials have long acknowledged
that the prewar assessments were flawed. David Kay, the former
head of the search team, famously told Congress last January,
"We were almost all wrong."
But other officials' statements have been more
qualified. In a speech last February, then-CIA Director George
Tenet said, "When the facts of Iraq are all in, we will neither
be completely right nor completely wrong."
The new report from the CIA, which is dated
Jan. 18, retreats from the agency's prewar assertions on
chemical weapons on almost every front. In one of several
key findings, the report concludes that, "Iraq probably did
not pursue chemical warfare efforts after 1991."
The report notes that its new conclusions "vary
significantly"from prewar judgments "largely because of subsequent
events and direct access to Iraqi officials, scientists,
facilities and documents." A note in the report describes
it as the second in a "retrospective series that addresses
our post Operation Iraqi Freedom understanding of Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction and delivery system programs."
A Jan. 4 report focused on scud missiles and
other delivery systems. Intelligence officials said future
reports will revise the agency's prewar claims. Those allegations
were a centerpiece of the Bush administration's case for
war with Iraq.
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By GREG MILLER
Los Angeles Times
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