We Had Good Intel—The U.N.'s
Newsweek via MSNBC -- February 9, 2004
Report: Al-Qaida has obtained tactical nuclear explosives
Ha'aretz -- February 9, 2004
By Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondent, and Haaretz Service
Al-Qaida has possessed tactical nuclear weapons for about six years, the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper reported Sunday.
The Arabic daily reported that sources close to Al-Qaida said Osama bin Laden's group bought the nuclear weapons from Ukrainian scientists who were visiting Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1998.
The report has not been confirmed
Public, classified versions of Iraq intelligence report differed
Knight Ridder Washington Bureau -- February 9, 2004
WASHINGTON - Following are excerpts from the public and classified versions of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons capabilities.The first set of quotes under each topic is from the public version, "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs," which was released by the CIA in October 2002. The second set is from the classified version of the NIE, portions of which were declassified and released by the White House in July 2003.
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WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
"Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon within this decade." -public version.
"We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon within this decade. (See INR alternative view at the end of these Key Judgments.)" -classified version.
"Iraq hides large portions of Iraq's WMD efforts." -public version.
"We judge that we are seeing only a portion of Iraq's WMD efforts, owing to Baghdad's vigorous denial and deception efforts. ... We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD programs." -classified version.
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NUCLEAR PROGRAM
" ... most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." -public version.
"The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq may be doing so, but INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment. Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons programs, INR is unwilling to ... project a timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening." -classified version, "State/INR Alternative View of Iraq's Nuclear Program."
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BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS
"Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating BW agents and is capable of quickly producing and weaponizing a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operatives, including potentially against the US Homeland." -public version.
"We judge Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating BW agents and is capable of quickly producing and weaponizing a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operatives.
"... Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington with a stronger case for making war.
"Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge.
" ... we have no specific intelligence information that Saddam's regime has directed attacks against US territory."-classified version.
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UNMANNED AIRCRAFT
"Baghdad's UAVs - especially if used for delivery of chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents - could threaten Iraq's neighbors, US forces in the Persian Gulf, and the United States if brought close to, or into, the US Homeland." -public version.
" ... The Director, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, US Air Force, does not agree that Iraq is developing UAVs primarily intended to be delivery platforms for chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents. The small size of Iraq's new UAV strongly suggests a primary role of reconnaissance, although CBW delivery is an inherent capability." -classified version.
[An analysis of classified vs. public versions of the assessments of intelligence on Iraq.]
Doubts, dissent stripped from public version of Iraq assessment
Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau -- February 9, 2004
By Jonathan S. Landay
WASHINGTON - The public version of the U.S. intelligence community's key prewar assessment of Iraq's illicit arms programs was stripped of dissenting opinions, warnings of insufficient information and doubts about deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's intentions, a review of the document and its once-classified version shows.
As a result, the public was given a far more definitive assessment of Iraq's plans and capabilities than President Bush and other U.S. decision-makers received from their intelligence agencies.
The stark differences between the public version and the then top-secret version of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate raise new questions about the accuracy of the public case made for a war that's claimed the lives of more than 500 U.S. service members and thousands of Iraqis.
The two documents are replete with differences. For example, the public version declared that "most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and says "if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon within this decade."
But it fails to mention the dissenting view offered in the top-secret version by the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as the INR.
That view said, in part, "The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq may be doing so, but INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment."
The alternative view further said "INR is unwilling to ... project a timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening."
Both versions were written by the National Intelligence Council, a board of senior analysts who report to CIA Director George Tenet and prepare reports on crucial national security issues. Stuart Cohen, a 30-year CIA veteran, was the NIC's acting chairman at the time.
The CIA didn't respond officially to requests to explain the differences in the two versions. But a senior intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, explained them by saying a more candid public version could have revealed U.S. intelligence-gathering methods.
Last week, Tenet defended the intelligence community's reporting on Iraq, telling an audience at Georgetown University that differences over Iraq's capabilities "were spelled out" in the October 2002 intelligence estimate.
But while top U.S. officials may have been told of differences among analysts, those disputes were kept from the American public in key areas, including whether Saddam was stockpiling biological and chemical weapons and whether he might dispatch poison-spraying robot aircraft to attack the United States.
Both documents have been available to the public for months. The CIA released the public version, titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs," in October 2002, when the Bush administration was making its case for war. The White House declassified and released portions of the NIE's key findings in July 2003.
Knight Ridder compared the documents in light of Tenet's speech and continuing controversy over the intelligence that President Bush used to justify the invasion last April. There are currently seven separate official inquiries into the issue.
What that comparison showed is that while the top-secret version delivered to Bush, his top lieutenants and Congress was heavily qualified with caveats about some of its most important conclusions about Iraq's illicit weapons programs, those caveats were omitted from the public version.
The caveats included the phases "we judge that," "we assess that" and "we lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD (weapons of mass destruction) programs."
These phrases, according to current and former intelligence officials, long have been used in intelligence reports to stress an absence of hard information and underscore that judgments are extrapolations or estimates.
Among the most striking differences between the versions were those over Iraq's development of small, unmanned aircraft, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles.
The public version said Iraq's UAVs "especially if used for delivery of chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents - could threaten Iraq's neighbors, US forces in the Persian Gulf, and the United States if brought close to, or into, the US Homeland."
The classified version showed there was major disagreement on the issue from the agency with the greatest expertise on such aircraft, the Air Force. The Air Force "does not agree that Iraq is developing UAVs primarily intended to be delivery platforms for chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents," it said. "The small size of Iraq's new UAV strongly suggests a primary role of reconnaissance, although CBW delivery is an inherent capability."
There was substantial difference between the public version of the estimate and the classified version on the issue of Iraq's biological weapons program.
The public version contained the alarming warning that Iraq was capable of quickly developing biological warfare agents that could be delivered by "bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operatives, including potentially against the US Homeland."
No such warning that Iraq's biological weapons could be delivered to United States appeared in the classified version.
In a section on chemical weapons, the top-secret findings said the intelligence community had "little specific information on Iraq's CW (chemical weapons) stockpile." That caveat was deleted from the public version.
The classified report went on to say that Iraq "probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons (MT) and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW agents - much of it added last year."
"Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents," said the public report.
Deleted from the public version was a line in the classified report that cast doubt on whether Saddam was prepared to support terrorist attacks on the United States, a danger that Bush and his top aides raised repeatedly in making their case for war.
"Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington with a stronger case for making war," the top-secret report said.
Also missing from the public report were judgments that Iraq would attempt "clandestine attacks" on the United States only if an American invasion threatened the survival of Saddam's regime or "possibly for revenge."
Bush says Iraq may not have had WMD
Financial Times -- 9 February, 2004
By Guy Dinmore in Washington, Ben Hall in London and Judy Dempsey in Munich
President George W. Bush has acknowledged for the first time that Iraq might not have had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, but denied that he led the US into war on false pretences.
Mr Bush, who is under domestic pressure to account for the apparent failure of US intelligence, gave a robust defence of his decision to go to war in an intense, hour-long interview broadcast on Monday on NBC's Meet the Press and recorded in the White House on Saturday.
Hans Blix criticises Iraqi WMD intelligence processes
ABC Online (Australia) -- 9 February, 2004
HANS BLIX: I think there was missing all the way through, from intelligence and from the governments, a critical thinking. They were so sure that Iraq had weapons, it was like a witch hunt.
If you are convinced that there are witches, and they were, then you take you every broom you see in a corner as evidence of the existence of the witches.
The 45-minute case collapses (Part 1)
JIC alerted Blair three times over unsafe WMD claim
The Independent -- 8 February 2004
By Andy McSmith Political Editor
Tony Blair was sent three intelligence reports in the six months during the run up to the Iraq war, including one that warned him that information on whether Saddam Hussein still held any chemical or biological weapons was "inconsistent" and "sparse".
Fischer say 'I told you so' -- but mildly
UPI via Washington Times -- February 8, 2004
MUNICH, Germany, Feb. 7 (UPI) -- Events in Iraq have proved Germany right in opposing the war, but Berlin wants to help in bringing peace, Foreign Minister Joscka Fischer declared Saturday.
"The Federal (German) Government feels that events have proven the position it took at the time to be right," Fischer told the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy. "It was our political decision not to join the coalition because we were not, and are still not convinced of the validity of the reasons for war."
Rumsfeld Offers Fervent Defense of Iraq War
New York Times -- February 8, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
MUNICH, Feb. 7 — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Saturday offered an impassioned defense of the American-led war against Iraq to some of Europe's fiercest critics of the conflict.
Mr. Rumsfeld placed the blame for the war squarely on Saddam Hussein for his "deception and defiance," and refusal to abandon his illegal weapons program, as Libya did recently.
"It was his choice," Mr. Rumsfeld said in a speech here to an audience of 250 government ministers, lawmakers and national security experts from 30 countries, most of them in Europe. "If the Iraqi regime had taken the same steps Libya is now taking, there would have been no war."
Asked in a question-and-answer session afterward about apparent American intelligence failures in Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledged it was a question of critical importance that would be examined by the commission appointed on Friday by President Bush, but emphasized that the panel would look at intelligence successes as well as shortcomings.
Mr. Rumsfeld's remarks drew several pointed questions from the audience challenging how the administration could defend its doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against perceived threats when the precise intelligence needed for such a strategy apparently failed in the case of Iraq.
"If you're going to live in this world and it is a dangerous world, you do have to have elegant intelligence," Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledged.
But he repeatedly defended the get-them-before-they-get-us doctrine in an age when terrorists are threatening to acquire and use biological, chemical and nuclear weapons as "something that has to be weighed and considered by all of us" given the possible catastrophic consequences.
A year ago at this same international security conference, the Munich Conference on Security Policy, Mr. Rumsfeld sparred with European officials, notably Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, over whether NATO member countries should gird for war with Iraq or allow weapons inspectors to continue their search. Thousands of antiwar demonstrators gathered then in the streets of Munich.
This year, with the Bush administration needing European troops to help stabilize and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington has sought to smooth over the trans-Atlantic rift, including a major speech in Switzerland last month by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Conference participants this week said they sensed that tensions had eased, replaced by a desire to move beyond the dispute and to combat common security problems, like terrorism and the spread of illicit arms. This year, relatively few protesters turned out.
In this climate, many officials here expected a tempered, if not conciliatory speech on Saturday from Mr. Rumsfeld, who is still regarded by many Germans and French, in particular, as a villain for his dismissive remarks about "old Europe." Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld, feisty and unyielding, appeared eager to put a potential adversary on the defensive as he laid out the administration's rationale for the war in the absence of any illegal Iraqi weapons.
"Think about what was going on in Iraq a year ago with people being tortured, rape rooms, mass graves, gross corruption, a country that has used chemical weapons against its own people," he said in response to a question, his voice rising, his hands chopping the air for emphasis.
He then turned the question back on the audience. "There were prominent people from representative countries in this room that opined that they really didn't think it made a hell of a lot of difference who won," he said, nearly shouting. "Shocking. Absolutely shocking."
Asked whether America's stature in the world had been diminished since the war, he acknowledged the Iraq war had taken its toll, but contended that it was more because of biased reporting by Arab media like Al Jazeera than anything the United States had done. "I know in my heart and my brain that America ain't what's wrong in the world," he said.
Some European participants said they were stunned by what they called Mr. Rumsfeld's arrogance, especially in light of the apparent intelligence failures in Iraq. "His view is, `We're right, they're wrong, and we'll continue to be right,' " said Christoph Bertram, director of the German Institute for International Politics and Security in Berlin. "It was a performance of `We know better.' "
Other participants said the speech illustrated a problem of Europeans and Americans talking past each other on critical security issues.
Speaking to the conference before Mr. Rumsfeld's address, Mr. Fischer, the German foreign minister, said of the Iraq war that "events have proven the position we took at the time to be right." But he then repeatedly called for both sides to set aside their views on the war and work closely to ensure that Iraq does not fall victim to former members of Mr. Hussein's government and foreign terrorists operating in Iraq.
"We have to win the peace together," said Mr. Fischer, adding that only United Nations involvement could bring legitimacy to the process of restoring Iraqi sovereignty. "We must develop a common strategy with which to prevail over the jihadists."
Mr. Fischer proposed that the United States and Europe pool their resources to save the Middle East from what he called a crisis of modernization that was fostering terrorism and instability in the region.
He proposed a wide-ranging Middle East initiative to enhance security, bolster local economies and strengthen democratic institutions in Middle Eastern nations, like the rule of law and political freedoms. He urged that NATO members pursue the initiative before the alliance's summit meeting in Istanbul in June.
In a brief interview after Mr. Rumsfeld's remarks, Mr. Fischer declined to comment on them except to say, "I think we have to look for the positive aspects."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Bush's WMD intelligence panel includes 3 Dems
Pittsburg Post-Gazette -- February 7, 2004
Who knew about WMD claim: Rudd
news.com.au -- February 7, 2004
LABOR today demanded to know whether pre-war advice that Iraq had only the remnants of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was given to government ministers.
The Age newspaper reported Roger Hill, who led a UN weapons inspection team in Iraq in 1998, told Australian troops before the war in Iraq that Iraq did not (not) have the ability to launch WMD at its neighbours.
Mr Hill, who formerly served in the Special Air Service, reportedly briefed SAS troops that Iraq had almost no capacity to use WMD in the battlefield.
Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said Mr Hill's briefing to the troops contradicted public statements made at the time by Prime Minister John Howard on Iraq's WMD capability.
"Here we have John Howard's credibility torpedoed amidships," Mr Rudd said.
Not everyone got it wrong on Iraq's weapons
The International Herald Tribune -- February 6, 2004
WASHINGTON 'We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's former top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find any such weapons lay with the U.S. intelligence community, which, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data to the political advantage of President George W. Bush.
The president's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate this intelligence failure only reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November presidential election.
The fact, independent of the findings of any commission, is that not everyone was wrong.
WMD panel shouldn’t blame CIA, diplomat says
MSNBC -- February 6, 2004
SEATTLE - Joseph Wilson, the retired diplomat who sparked a furor with revelations about his own findings in the run-up to the Iraq war, said Friday the nation’s intelligence system is due for an overhaul.
Wilson, in an interview with MSNBC.com, said President Bush’s appointment of an independent commission to study intelligence failures in Iraq and elsewhere could play a useful role if it sets the stage for reform.
But Wilson, whose wife was famously “outed” as a CIA agent after he went public with his concerns about White House misstatements, warned that the commission will serve no useful purpose if it becomes a pawn in a blame game over Iraq.
“The accountability for this war in Iraq does not lie with (CIA director) George Tenet and the intelligence community,” he said. “It resides with the president of the United States and his war Cabinet advisers.”
Intelligence officials warned that Iraq WMD information was iffy
Knight-Ridder Tribune via oudaily.com -- February 6, 2004
Jonathan S. Landay
WASHINGTON — Dubious intelligence about Iraq’s biological weapons programs found its way into the Bush administration’s case for a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq despite the fact that officials warned in May 2002 that some of the information might be unreliable or fabricated.
Transcript: CIA director Tenet's address on intelligence
The National Business Review (New Zealand) -- February 6, 2004
'Bogus Use of Intelligence,' Not CIA, to Blame for WMD Claims
Falls Church News-Press -- February 5, 2004
By Nicholas F. Benton
The Bush administration's use of false claims that "weapons of mass destruction" posed an imminent threat to the U.S. and its allies as a pretext for a preemptive and unilateral invasion of Iraq was based on "bogus use of intelligence" by Bush, and was not a failure of the intelligence community.
So asserted the former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak in an extraordinary briefing yesterday at the Virginia state headquarters of the Dean for President campaign in the City of Falls Church.
"The allegation that the blame lies with the CIA is bogus, as well," he said. "I expect the White House to slow-roll the investigation until the final results are not in until after the election."
Howard joins wave of doubt over WMD
stuff.co.nz -- 04 February 2004
By TOM ALLARD, PETER FRAY in London and agencies
Australian Prime Minister John Howard has conceded for the first time that Australia's intelligence on Iraq could have been wrong, while the United States has admitted it might never have launched the invasion had it known there was no stockpile of illegal weapons.
"In the fullness of time it might be demonstrated that the advice was inaccurate," John Howard said yesterday as it emerged that he had received a copy of Parliament's report into the apparent prewar failures of spy agencies.
[Seen at The Memory Hole.]
US officials knew in May Iraq possessed no WMD
Blair comes under pressure as Americans admit it was widely known that Saddam had no chemical arsenal
The Observer -- February 1, 2004
Peter Beaumont, Gaby Hinsliff and Paul Harris
Senior American officials concluded at the beginning of last May that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, The Observer has learnt.
Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors familiar with the details of the hunt for WMD told The Observer it was widely known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling, despite the assertions of senior Bush administration figures and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong
The Atlantic Monthly -- January/February 2004
by Kenneth M. Pollack
Let's start with one truth: last March, when the United States and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, the American public and much of the rest of the world believed that after Saddam Hussein's regime sank, a vast flotsam of weapons of mass destruction would bob to the surface. That, of course, has not been the case. In the words of David Kay, the principal adviser to the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), an organization created late last spring to search for prohibited weaponry, "I think all of us who entered Iraq expected the job of actually discovering deployed weapons to be easier than it has turned out to be." Many people are now asking very reasonable questions about why they were misled.
The Lie Factory
Mother Jones -- January/February 2004
Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.
[Another copy of this transcript can be found at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace]
Transcript: David Kay at Senate hearing
CNN -- January 28, 2004
(CNN) -- Former top U.S. weapons inspector David Kay testified Wednesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee about efforts to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Following is a transcript of Kay's opening remarks before committee members began questioning him.
KAY: As you know and we discussed, I do not have a written statement. This hearing came about very quickly. I do have a few preliminary comments, but I suspect you're more interested in asking questions, and I'll be happy to respond to those questions to the best of my ability.
I would like to open by saying that the talent, dedication and bravery of the staff of the [Iraq Survey Group] that was my privilege to direct is unparalleled and the country owes a great debt of gratitude to the men and women who have served over there and continue to serve doing that.
A great deal has been accomplished by the team, and I do think ... it important that it goes on and it is allowed to reach its full conclusion. In fact, I really believe it ought to be better resourced and totally focused on WMD; that that is important to do it.
But I also believe that it is time to begin the fundamental analysis of how we got here, what led us here and what we need to do in order to ensure that we are equipped with the best possible intelligence as we face these issues in the future.
Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here.
Sen. [Edward] Kennedy knows very directly. Senator Kennedy and I talked on several occasions prior to the war that my view was that the best evidence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction.
I would also point out that many governments that chose not to support this war -- certainly, the French president, [Jacques] Chirac, as I recall in April of last year, referred to Iraq's possession of WMD.
The Germans certainly -- the intelligence service believed that there were WMD.
It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.
We're also in a period in which we've had intelligence surprises in the proliferation area that go the other way. The case of Iran, a nuclear program that the Iranians admit was 18 years on, that we underestimated. And, in fact, we didn't discover it. It was discovered by a group of Iranian dissidents outside the country who pointed the international community at the location.
The Libyan program recently discovered was far more extensive than was assessed prior to that.
There's a long record here of being wrong. There's a good reason for it. There are probably multiple reasons. Certainly proliferation is a hard thing to track, particularly in countries that deny easy and free access and don't have free and open societies.
In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact, that I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of [U.N.] Resolution 1441.
Resolution 1441 required that Iraq report all of its activities -- one last chance to come clean about what it had.
We have discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited under the initial U.N. Resolution 687 and that should have been reported under 1441, with Iraqi testimony that not only did they not tell the U.N. about this, they were instructed not to do it and they hid material.
I think the aim -- and certainly the aim of what I've tried to do since leaving -- is not political and certainly not a witch hunt at individuals. It's to try to direct our attention at what I believe is a fundamental fault analysis that we must now examine.
And let me take one of the explanations most commonly given: Analysts were pressured to reach conclusions that would fit the political agenda of one or another administration. I deeply think that is a wrong explanation.
As leader of the effort of the Iraqi Survey Group, I spent most of my days not out in the field leading inspections. It's typically what you do at that level. I was trying to motivate, direct, find strategies.
In the course of doing that, I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance.
And never -- not in a single case -- was the explanation, "I was pressured to do this." The explanation was very often, "The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it."
And each case was different, but the conversations were sufficiently in depth and our relationship was sufficiently frank that I'm convinced that, at least to the analysts I dealt with, I did not come across a single one that felt it had been, in the military term, "inappropriate command influence" that led them to take that position.
It was not that. It was the honest difficulty based on the intelligence that had -- the information that had been collected that led the analysts to that conclusion.
And you know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence because we know how to correct that.
We get rid of the people who, in fact, were exercising that.
The fact that it wasn't tells me that we've got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong, and we've got to figure out what was there. And that's what I call fundamental fault analysis.
And like I say, I think we've got other cases other than Iraq. I do not think the problem of global proliferation of weapons technology of mass destruction is going to go away, and that's why I think it is an urgent issue.
And let me really wrap up here with just a brief summary of what I think we are now facing in Iraq. I regret to say that I think at the end of the work of the [Iraq Survey Group] there's still going to be an unresolvable ambiguity about what happened.
A lot of that traces to the failure on April 9 to establish immediately physical security in Iraq -- the unparalleled looting and destruction, a lot of which was directly intentional, designed by the security services to cover the tracks of the Iraq WMD program and their other programs as well, a lot of which was what we simply called Ali Baba looting. "It had been the regime's. The regime is gone. I'm going to go take the gold toilet fixtures and everything else imaginable."
I've seen looting around the world and thought I knew the best looters in the world. The Iraqis excel at that.
The result is -- document destruction -- we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
But I do think the survey group -- and I think Charlie Duelfer is a great leader. I have the utmost confidence in Charles. I think you will get as full an answer as you can possibly get.
And let me just conclude by my own personal tribute, both to the president and to [CIA Director] George Tenet, for having the courage to select me to do this, and my successor, Charlie Duelfer, as well.
Both of us are known for probably at times regrettable streak of independence. I came not from within the administration, and it was clear and clear in our discussions and no one asked otherwise that I would lead this the way I thought best and I would speak the truth as we found it. I have had absolutely no pressure prior, during the course of the work at the [Iraq Survey Group], or after I left to do anything otherwise.
I think that shows a level of maturity and understanding that I think bodes well for getting to the bottom of this. But it is really up to you and your staff, on behalf of the American people, to take on that challenge. It's not something that anyone from the outside can do. So I look forward to these hearings and other hearings at how you will get to the conclusions.
I do believe we have to understand why reality turned out to be different than expectations and estimates. But you have more public service -- certainly many of you -- than I have ever had, and you recognize that this is not unusual.
I told Sen. [John] Warner [chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee] earlier that I've been drawn back as a result of recent film of reminding me of something. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the combined estimate was unanimity in the intelligence service that there were no Soviet warheads in Cuba at the time of the missile crisis.
Fortunately, President Kennedy and [then-Attorney General] Robert Kennedy disagreed with the estimate and chose a course of action less ambitious and aggressive than recommended by their advisers.
But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.
So that by the end of the Johnson administration, the intelligence community had a capability to do what it had not been able to do at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.
I think you face a similar responsibility in ensuring that the community is able to do a better job in the future than it has done in the past.