CIA to focus on future weapons

The change in focus has angered critics who see it as a way to justify the invasion.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
WASHINGTON -- Having failed to find banned weapons in Iraq, the CIA is preparing a final report on its search effort that will speculate on what the deposed regime's capabilities might have looked like years from now if left unchecked, according to congressional and intelligence officials.
The CIA now plans for the final report, due next month, to project as far out as 2008 what Iraq might have achieved in its unconventional weapons programs if the United States hadn't invaded the country last year, the officials said.
The new direction of the inquiry is seen by some officials as an attempt to obscure the fact that no banned weapons -- or even evidence of active programs -- have been found, and instead emphasize theories that Iraq may have been planning to revive its programs at a later date.
Prompted anger
The change in focus has angered some officials in the intelligence community, and at least one key Democrat in Congress, and has brought charges of political motivation.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., protested the decision in a sharply worded letter to acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin last week. Trying to forecast Iraq's weapons capabilities four years into the future would be "by definition, highly speculative" and "inconsistent with the original mission of the Iraq Survey Group," Harman wrote, according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
Such an effort would be a significant departure for a survey group whose primary mission when it was established last year was to locate and destroy stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons that the CIA and other agencies believed were hidden in Iraq.
David Kay, who led Iraq Survey Group before resigning in January, said speculating on Iraq's future capabilities was never part of the group's mission.
"Absolutely not," Kay said in a telephone interview Thursday. "We were to search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. No one ever suggested to me in any of the discussions before I took the job, afterward, or even when I left, that [assessing Iraq's future capabilities] was a thing that should have been done."
Kay and others questioned how such an assessment would be possible given the disarray that characterized Saddam Hussein's regime in recent years, and external events that have altered the flow of illicit weapons technologies around the world.
His report
Kay reported in January that Iraq's programs essentially were dormant before the war. The country was still subject to U.N. sanctions and was facing a new round of inspections. Since then, authorities have cracked down on global weapons markets, most notably by unraveling the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Kahn.
Iraq analysts could produce "technical assessments" of what dual-use equipment and materials might have yielded in the short term if they were turned toward the production of illegal arms, Kay said. "But doing two to four years out -- I just don't find that sensible," he said.
Kay was replaced in January by former U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who is overseeing the production of the survey group's final report. A CIA spokesman declined to say whether the report would attempt to forecast what Iraq's weapons programs might have looked like if there hadn't been a U.S. invasion.
"Charles Duelfer's mission is to search for the truth, and he made clear when he took the job that he was absolutely committed to following the evidence wherever it takes us," CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said. "That is what he's doing, and that is what will be reflected in his report."
The failure to find stockpiles of banned weapons has been a source of embarrassment to the CIA as well as the Bush administration, which made disarming Saddam the principal rationale for launching a pre-emptive war against Iraq last year.
For that reason, some officials familiar with the CIA's plans for the final report questioned the motivation. "The case made by the Bush White House was that [Iraq] was an imminent threat that must be dealt with today," said one senior congressional official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Coming out later and saying [Saddam] would have had the weapons in 2006 or 2008 ... is basically a way to justify pre-emption."
A U.S. intelligence official said political pressure was playing no role in the shaping of Duelfer's report. "That's nonsense," the official said.
The plan to have the report project the potential of Baghdad's weapons programs was disclosed during a classified briefing on Capitol Hill last month by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, the former military commander of the weapons search group, according to congressional officials familiar with the briefing.
In her Aug. 13 letter, Harman said Dayton "told staff that the report will focus on what the state of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs would have been in 2006 or 2008 had the United States not gone to war with Iraq in 2003."
In a media briefing last May describing the formation of the survey group, Dayton said its mission "is the search for and elimination of weapons of mass destruction." Dayton has since moved to another assignment in the Army, and a spokesman said he did not wish to comment.
Other sources familiar with the work of the Iraq Survey Group confirmed the change in direction, saying they had learned of it in recent months, even before Dayton discussed it during the briefing.
Request in letter
Harman's letter asked McLaughlin for his "personal assurances that the focus of [the CIA] report will remain on what the search efforts in Iraq actually yielded and that it will be rooted in hard facts."
A spokeswoman for Harman said the congresswoman had not received a CIA response.
The U.S. intelligence official said describing Iraq's future capabilities was "not the focus at all" of the final report and that "the report will not be speculative."
But the official declined to say whether such projections would be part of the document, saying he could not comment "on a report that hasn't been completed."