OnePeople

CIA: Iraq Will Use Terror If Attacked

The CIA Director, George Tenet, provided the long-awaited National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to Congress. The two significant findings:

* Iraq is producing weapons of mass destruction to create a "blackmail" scenario to increase its power in the region
* Iraq will not attack the United States unless it is provoked, since it has no interest in doing so.

This second conclusion seems to run against the Bush Administration's policy towards Iraq, and many media outlets interpreted the report as the CIA's effort to moderate the President's policies in the region.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that the report did not contradict the President's policy, as the blackmail scenario was the most significant part of the report.

The Internation Herald Tribune offers an excellent overview of the story, and is a good place to start.

The Scoop is good enough to produce the full text of the White House press conference.

MSNBC points out that the NIE is a classified document, and that the CIA only declassified portions of the document at the behest of the Democrat-controlled intelligence committee. So what was revealed in the NIE is not the complete report.

LA Times is reporting that the Pentagon is at "war" with the CIA over the Iraq NIE. The Defense Department would apparently like to hear more about the Iraqi links to Al Qaeda. There is concern in Congress and at the CIA about the "politicization" of intelligence; the possibility that political agendas could contaminate the CIA's analyses.

-- posted by Gunnar at October 10, 2002 08:57 AM