Rice, Powell deny WMD threat was hyped

The Bush administration’s two foreign policy advisers on Sunday said it was the judgment of US intelligence that Saddam Hussein possess...

The Bush administration’s two foreign policy advisers on Sunday said it was the judgment of US intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and that Bush and others did not exaggerate the threat before going to war.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice described as ‘‘revisionist history’’ recent criticism that senior Bush officials starting with President may have overstated what was known about Iraq’s WMDS leading to the war. ‘‘The truth of the matter,’’ Rice said on NBC’s Meet the Press, ‘‘is that reports by intelligence agencies around the world, reports by UN inspectors asking hard questions of Saddam Hussein, and tremendous efforts by this regime to conceal and hide what it was doing, clearly give a picture of a regime that had WMDs and was determined to conceal them.’’

Democrat contenders use criticise Bush over Iraq

MOUNT PLEASANT: Democrats seeking their party’s 2004 presidential nomination attacked President George Bush on Sunday over the way he built the case for war against Iraq, saying the failure to find WMDs meant his credibility was at stake. ‘‘I never thought I’d hear this question ever raised again in my lifetime, but the question now is going to become ‘what did the President know and when did he know it’?’’ former Vermont Governor Howard Dean said, in an obvious reference to Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. He said Bush had engaged in a ‘‘pattern of deception and deceit.’’ (Reuters)

She said that Director of Central Intelligence (CI) George Tenet believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ‘‘the President gets his intelligence from his Director of CI.’’ The key judgments of the intelligence community, Rice said on ABC’s This Week, were contained in an October 2002 intelligence estimate which said that ‘‘Iraq had WMDs’’ and Saddam ‘‘was continuing to improve his WMD capabilities, that he was hiding these from the world.’’

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It also said that Iraq ‘‘probably’’ had concealed items ‘‘necessary for continuing its chemical warfare effort’’ and was rebuilding dual-use equipment that ‘‘could’’ be diverted to weapons production. She said Tenet, who had signed off on the October paper, ‘‘runs a disciplined process that takes into account the views of different intelligence agencies … (and) takes into account differences about this or that data point.’’

Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing on the morning talk shows on Sunday, also defended the administration’s pre-war statements and particularly his speech before the UN Security Council on February 5, as representing a ‘‘good, solid assessment’’ of Iraq’s weapons programmes.

Like Rice, Powell pointed at Tenet, saying Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction was ‘‘the official judgment of the DCI who is the one responsible for gathering all this information.’’ Rice and Powell said they believed the weapons would still turn up as the search in Iraq continues. (LAT-WP)