CIA chief defends intelligence on Iraq

WASHINGTON — CIA Director George Tenet took the unusual step Friday of publicly defending the agency's intelligence on Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons amid growing criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated what it knew about the Iraqi weapons programs to advance its case for going to war.

The statement by Tenet — a rarity for a director of central intelligence, who normally does not react publicly to criticism about intelligence matters except during testimony before Congress — underscored the ferment that has been building within the intelligence agencies because of the failure to date of U.S. forces in Iraq to uncover any proscribed weapons.

Three complaints have been filed with the CIA ombudsman about the possible politicization by the administration of intelligence on Iraq, an intelligence official said, but he would not describe the substance of the complaints. One senior administration official said that there have been complaints by CIA analysts that they felt pressured by administration policymakers who questioned them before the war about the basis for their assessment of Iraq's weapons programs.

"Our role is to call it like we see it, to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and what we base it on," Tenet said in a statement released by the CIA. "The integrity of our process was maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong."

Tenet's statement came in response to the release on Thursday of a "memorandum" to President Bush posted on several Internet sites by a group of retired CIA and State Department intelligence analysts who said there was "growing mistrust and cynicism" among intelligence professionals over "intelligence cited by you and your chief advisers to justify the war against Iraq."

The group, which calls itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, said the failure to find weapons of mass destruction after six weeks of searching "suggests either that such weapons are simply not there or that those eventually found there will not be in sufficient quantity or capability to support your repeated claim that Iraq posed a grave threat to our country's security."

The group called on the president to allow U.N. inspectors to return to Iraq, saying, "If the U.S. doesn't make undisputed discoveries of forbidden weapons, the failure will feed already widespread skepticism abroad about the motives for going to war." It added that intelligence in the past had been "warped for political purposes but never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize launching a war."