New CIA Response Shows Administration Exaggeration of Intelligence

WASHINGTON – Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., made the following remarks on the Senate floor today:

Tomorrow’s report of the Senate Intelligence Committee will be intensely and extensively critical of the CIA for its intelligence failures and mischaracterizations regarding Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. It is accurate and is a hard-hitting and well-deserved critique of the CIA. It is, of course, but half of the picture. Earlier today I released an example of the other half.

A few days ago the CIA finally answered [PDF], in an unclassified form, the question I have been asking them about whether the Intelligence Community believes that a meeting between an Iraqi intelligence official and Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, occurred in Prague in the months before Al Qaeda’s attack on America on 9/11. Their answer illustrates the point that while tomorrow’s Intelligence Committee report is extremely useful regarding CIA's failings, it does not address another central issue -- the Administration’s exaggerations of the intelligence that the CIA provided to them. That is left for the second phase of the Intelligence Committee’s investigation.

This newly released unclassified statement by the CIA demonstrates that it was the Administration, not the CIA, that exaggerated the connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The new CIA statement states that the CIA finds no credible information that the April 2001, meeting occurred, and in fact, that it was unlikely that it did occur.

A bit of history. On December 9, 2001, Tim Russert asked the Vice President whether Iraq was involved in the September 11th attack. The Vice President replied: “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he [Mohammed Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.”

Vice President Cheney also said in his interview with CNBC on June 17th that the report from the Czechs was evidence that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks, and in his interview with the Rocky Mountain News on January 9th of this year, the Vice President also said that the alleged meeting between the hijacker Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague a few months before 9/11 “possibly tied the two together to 9/11.”

President Bush frequently exaggerated the overall relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. For instance, on the deck of the aircraft carrier President Bush stated that “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We’ve removed an ally of Al Qaeda.” [emphasis added].

Relative to the alleged Prague meeting itself, Vice President Cheney continues this misleading rhetoric by stating that we cannot prove one way or another that the so-called Prague meeting occurred. Vice President Cheney said on June 17th on CNBC that: “We have never been able to prove that there was a connection there on 9/11. The one thing we had is the Iraq – the Czech intelligence service report saying that Mohamed Atta had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official at the embassy on April 9, 2001. That’s never been proven; it’s never been refuted.” [emphasis added].

What the Vice President continues to leave out is the critical second half of the CIA’s now unclassified assessment that “although we cannot rule it out, we are increasingly skeptical that such a meeting occurred.” [emphasis added]. And he also omits the key CIA now unclassified statement that “In the absence of any credible information that the April 2001 meeting occurred, we assess that Atta would have been unlikely to undertake the substantial risk of contacting any Iraqi official as late as April 2001, with the plot already well along toward execution.” [emphasis added].

In summary, the CIA says there is no credible evidence that the meeting occurred and it is unlikely that it did occur.

The American public was led to believe before the Iraq War that Iraq had a role in the 9/11 attack on America and that the actions of Al Qaeda and Iraq were “part of the same threat,” as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has put it.

It was not the CIA that led to public to believe that.

It was the leaders of this Administration.

Four attachments:

Senator Levin: New CIA Response Raises Questions Again: Where Does Vice President Cheney Get His Information? [PDF]

Letter to Vice President Cheney, February 12, 2004 [PDF]

Response of Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, July 1, 2004 [PDF]

Declassified document, prepared by Under Secretary Feith, shown at a briefing on the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship: Fundamental Problems with How Intelligence Community is Assessing Information [PDF]. Briefing was given to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, then Director Tenet and the CIA in August 2002, and then to the staffs of the Office of the Vice President and the National Security Council in September 2002.