House panel questions Iraq proof

Information called outdated; leak of agent named probed

By Mary Leonard and Bryan Bender, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent, 9/29/2003

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration scrambled yesterday to answer fresh attacks on the credibility of its case for toppling Saddam Hussein after House Intelligence Committee leaders called prewar information on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "outdated and circumstantial," and the Justice Department opened a probe into CIA allegations that the White House illegally leaked the name of one of its agents.

White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said she was unaware of any White House involvement in the disclosure, which occurred shortly after the agent's husband, former US ambassdaor Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly disputed President Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to acquire "yellowcake" uranium ore from Niger, possibly to use in its nuclear-weapons program.

"I know of nothing of any such White House effort to reveal any of this, and it certainly would not be the way that the president would expect his White House to operate," Rice said on "Fox News Sunday. Rice called the Justice Department inquiry "a matter of routine" and said the White House would cooperate.

Rice also asserted that the Bush administration had fresh and plausible information that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before the war began. "There was enrichment of intelligence from 1998 over the period leading up to the war," she said. "And nothing pointed to a reversal of Saddam Hussein's very active efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, to have very good programs in weapons of mass destruction.

"It was very clear that this had continued and was a gathering danger," Rice said, adding that Bush "stands behind" intelligence the CIA provided before the war.

The administraton's assertions were made just days before the US-led team searching for weapons of mass destruction is expected to report to Congress that after five months, no weapons have been found and no definitive conclusions can yet be made about Hussein's activities. White House officials have tried to downplay expectations about the report from David Kay, the top investigator, who as recently as July predicted that his team would uncover a few "surprises."

"It's only going to be a progress report," Rice said, adding that Kay has got "a very long way still to go."

In a letter to CIA Director George Tenet, Representatives Porter Goss, a Florida Republican, and Jane Harman, a California Democrat, said the intelligence panel's four-month examination of classified information used to justify the war revealed "significant deficiencies" in the way the intelligence had been collected, failures by the CIA to find reliable, new information since UN inspectors left Iraq in 1998, and "insufficient specific information" about Hussein's intentions and links to Al Qaeda.

"The absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programs had been destroyed was considered proof that they continued to exist," wrote Goss and Harman, who are chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Their letter, which was not signed by the full committee, was reported yesterday in the Washington Post.

CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said the intelligence community stood behind its findings and judgments, which he called "honest and professional," and said it was "absurd" to suggest the CIA would rely on outdated intelligence.

"Iraq was an intractable and difficult subject," Harlow said in a statement. "The tradecraft of intelligence rarely has the luxury of having black-and-white facts."

Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and a Democratic presidential candidate, called yesterday for Tenet to resign, asserting that the CIA chief knew the White House was leading the nation into war based on exaggerated intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction

"We now have 135,000 troops in Iraq under fire," Dean said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "We've lost over 300 people and over 1,100 wounded or injured because this president was not candid with the American people."

Representative Richard A. Gephardt, a Missouri Democrat and presidential candidate, said both the president and Congress should investigate the leak that resulted in the CIA agent being named in a July 14 column by syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak. Novak said his sources were senior administration officials. Intentionally disclosing the name of a covert operative is a violation of federal law.

"If the law was broken . . . people ought to be punished for doing this," Gephardt said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Wilson, the former acting ambassador to Iraq, became the focus of public scrutiny earlier this year when it was revealed that he was dispatched to Niger in the spring of 2002 to investigate a British intelligence report that said Iraq may have sought to purchase uranium for nuclear weapons from the African country.

He concluded at the time that the report was erroneous, but it still was included in Bush's January State of the Union address, a decision the White House later acknowledged was a mistake. Wilson has since been a vocal critic of the administration's Iraq policy, alleging that the White House revealed his wife's identity to deflect blame for the uranium gaffe to the CIA by suggesting that his wife, and by extension, the CIA, put him up for the Niger mission.

Yesterday, Wilson said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press that the CIA would not have referred the

matter to the Justice Department unless it thought that a crime had been committed. "It's pretty clear to me that, knowing that they could not shut me up because I had already told my story, the purpose for doing this was to intimidate others and keep others from stepping forward," Wilson said.