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Tenet says he corrected cheney privately { March 10 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/politics/10INTE.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/politics/10INTE.html
March 10, 2004
C.I.A. Chief Says He's Corrected Cheney Privately
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, March 9 — George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told a Senate committee on Tuesday that he had privately intervened on several occasions to correct what he regarded as public misstatements on intelligence by Vice President Dick Cheney and others, and that he would do so again.
"When I believed that someone was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it," he said.
Mr. Tenet identified three instances in which he had already corrected public statements by President Bush or Mr. Cheney or would do so, but he left the impression that there had been more.
His comments, in testimony before the Armed Services Committee, came under sharp questioning from some Democrats on the panel, who have criticized him and the White House over prewar intelligence on Iraq. He insisted that he had honored his obligation to play a neutral role as the top intelligence adviser.
In response to a question, he said he did not think the administration had misrepresented facts to justify going to war.
Mr. Tenet said he planned to call Mr. Cheney's attention to a recent misstatement, in a Jan. 9 interview, when the vice president recommended as "your best source of information" on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda the contents of a disputed memorandum by a senior Pentagon official, Douglas J. Feith.
That memorandum, sent last October to the Senate Intelligence Committee, portrayed what was presented as conclusive evidence of collaboration between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda, but it was never endorsed by intelligence agencies, who objected to Mr. Feith's findings.
Mr. Tenet said he was not aware of Mr. Cheney's comments in that interview, published in The Rocky Mountain News, until Monday night.
In his annual testimony before the committee on threats facing the United States, Mr. Tenet found himself drawn again into the dispute over whether intelligence agencies or policy makers were more to blame for misjudgments and overstatements about Iraq and whether Baghdad had ties to terrorism.
In his testimony, Mr. Tenet hinted at private disputes with policy makers. He disclosed that he had not learned until last week about a highly unusual briefing given in August 2002 by colleagues of Mr. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, to senior aides of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush. The briefing outlined evidence of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, contradicting the C.I.A.'s view that such links could not be verified.
According to government officials who have seen copies of the briefing documents, the information was presented to Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, and included slides that were strongly disparaging of C.I.A. analyses.
The other two instances in which Mr. Tenet said he had acted to correct administration statements involved the State of the Union address in January 2002, when he objected after the fact to Mr. Bush's inclusion of disputed intelligence about Iraq's seeking to obtain uranium from Africa, and a Jan. 22 radio interview in which Mr. Cheney portrayed trailers found in Iraq as being for biological weapons, and thus "conclusive evidence" that Iraq "did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction."
That was the conclusion initially reached by American intelligence agencies last spring, and it is still on the C.I.A.'s Web site. But it has been disputed since last summer within intelligence agencies, and Mr. Tenet said he had told Mr. Cheney there was "no consensus" among American analysts, with those at the Defense Intelligence Agency in particular arguing that the trailers were for producing hydrogen.
A spokesman for Mr. Cheney, Kevin Kellems, declined to characterize the content of the conversation between Mr. Tenet and Mr. Cheney about the Jan. 22 interview. "It was a private conversation," he said.
An administration official said, "Critics of the administration are misrepresenting what the vice president said in both of those interviews," and added, "I'm going to let the full text of those interviews speak for themselves."
Mr. Tenet has acknowledged that intelligence agencies may have made misjudgments in their prewar assessments of Iraq, which expressed certainty that Mr. Hussein's government possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program. In the year since the American invasion, no evidence has been found, though Mr. Tenet insisted again on Tuesday that it was too soon to draw firm conclusions about the extent to which intelligence agencies erred.
At the same time, as director of central intelligence, Mr. Tenet, who has been in his post since he was appointed by President Clinton in 1997, is widely seen as having the responsibility to prevent intelligence from being distorted for political purposes, and he seemed intent on defending himself and his agencies in that regard.
Still, he walked a careful line in his answers, and nothing in his comments seemed to suggest that he was walking away from the administration. He has promised President Bush that he will serve at least through this year.
Among the senators who pressed him hardest were two Democrats, Carl Levin of Michigan and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who has been an early and active ally of Senator John Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Mr. Kennedy asked Mr. Tenet if he believed the administration had misrepresented information about Iraq to justify war, to which Mr. Tenet responded, "No, sir, I don't."
When asked whether he had sought to correct certain administration statements, including some that portrayed Iraq's arsenal as carrying the danger of a "mushroom cloud," he said, "I'm not going to sit here today and tell you what my interaction was and what I did or what I didn't do." But he added: "You have the confidence to know that when I believed that somebody was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it. I don't stand up in public and do it. I do my job the way I did it in two administrations.
"And policy makers — you know, this is a tough road. Policy makers take data. They interpret threat. They assess risk. They put urgency behind it, and sometimes it doesn't uniquely comport with every word of an intelligence estimate."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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