Caveats on Iraq fell by the wayside

WASHINGTON — In their fall 2002 campaign to win congressional support for a war against Iraq, President Bush and his top advisers ignored many of the caveats and qualifiers included in the classified report on Saddam Hussein's weapons that CIA director George Tenet defended Thursday.

In fact, they made some of their most unequivocal assertions about unconventional weapons before the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was completed.

Iraq "is a grave and gathering danger," Bush told the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002. At the White House two weeks later — after referring to a British government report that Iraq could launch "a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order were given" — he went on to say, "Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX — nerve gas — or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally."

Three weeks later, on the day the NIE was delivered to Congress, Bush told lawmakers in the White House rose garden that Iraq's current course was "a threat of unique urgency."

On Thursday, summarizing the NIE's conclusions, Tenet said: "They never said Iraq was an imminent threat."

The administration's prewar comments, and the more cautious, caveated phrasings of intelligence analysts, are at the heart of the debate over whether the faulty prewar claims resulted from bad intelligence or exaggeration by top White House officials, or both.

Former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told senators that caveats often fall by the wayside "the higher you go up" the bureaucratic chain. At the top, he said, "you read the headlines, your read the summary, you're busy, you've got other things to do."

Administration supporters say Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others were simply extrapolating from the comprehensive intelligence provided by Tenet's intelligence community. Critics say Bush and his Cabinet had already decided to go to war, regardless of what the intelligence efforts found.

The controversy, arising during the Democratic presidential primaries, has taken on a partisan hue. Some Democrats, however, say they perceived GOP partisanship earlier, when Republicans advocated an invasion of Iraq before the 2002 congressional elections. Bush said on Sept. 13, 2002, he didn't think he could explain to voters the position of some Democrats who said Congress should wait for the United Nations to authorize force before giving the president the authority he wanted.