Congressional Record: July 8, 2004 (Senate)
Page S7811-S7819
Senate Intelligence Committee Report
Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, tomorrow's report of the Senate
Intelligence Committee will be intensely and extensively critical of
the CIA for its intelligence failures and mischaracteri-
[[Page S7812]]
zations regarding Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction.
That report is an accurate and 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, 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 Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, occurred in
Prague in the months before al-Qaida's attack in America on 9/11. The
answer of the CIA illustrates the point that tomorrow's Intelligence
Committee report is extremely useful regarding the CIA's failure, but
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-Qaida. The new CIA answer
states that the CIA finds no credible information that the April 2001
meeting occurred and, in fact, that it is 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 11 attack. The
Vice President replied:
It's been pretty well confirmed that he [Mohamed 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 17
of this year that the report from the Czechs was evidence that Iraq was
involved in the 9/11 attacks. In his interview with the Rocky Mountain
News on January 9 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-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. For instance, on the deck of the
aircraft carrier, President Bush stated:
The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign
against terror. We have removed an ally of al-Qaida.
Now, relative to the alleged Prague meeting itself, Vice President
Cheney continues the 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 17 on CNBC:
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.
But 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.''
The Vice President also omits the key CIA statement:
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 April 2001, with the plot already well
along toward execution.
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-Qaida and Iraq
were ``part of the same threat,'' as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz has put it.
Well, it was not the CIA that led the public to believe that; it was
the leadership of this administration.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that four documents, which I
referred to in the body of my remarks, be printed in the Record at this
point.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Response of Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet to Senator
Levin Question for the Record, March 9, 2004, Armed Services Committee
Hearing
Question 8. Director Tenet, do you believe it is likely
that September 11 hijacker Muhammad Atta and Iraqi
Intelligence Service officer Ahmed al-Ani met in Prague in
April 2001, or do you believe it unlikely that the meeting
took place?
Answer. Although we cannot rule it out, we are increasingly
skeptical that such a meeting occurred. The veracity of the
single-threaded reporting on which the original account of
the meeting was based has been questioned, and the Iraqi
official with whom Atta was alleged to have met has denied
ever having met Atta.
We have been able to corroborate only two visits by Atta to
the Czech Republic: one in late 1994, when he passed through
enroute to Syria; the other in June 2000, when, according to
detainee reporting, he departed for the United States from
Prague because he thought a non-EU member country would be
less likely to keep meticulous travel data.
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.
It is likewise hard to conceive of any single ingredient
crucial to the plot's success that could only be obtained
from Iraq.
In our judgment, the 11 September plot was complex in its
orchestration but simple in its basic conception. We believe
that the factors vital to success of the plot were all easily
within al-Qa'ida's means without resort to Iraqi expertise:
shrewd selection of operatives, training in hijacking
aircraft, a mastermind and pilots well-versed in the
procedures and behavior needed to blend in with US society,
long experience in moving money to support operations, and
the openness and tolerance of US society as well as the ready
availability of important information about targets, flight
schools, and airport and airline security practices.
____
New CIA Response Raises Question Again: Where Does Vice President
Cheney Get His Information?
On July 7th, I finally received an unclassified answer to a
Question for the Record that I had posed to Director of
Central Intelligence George Tenet after he appeared before
the Armed Services Committee on March 9, 2004. I am releasing
this response today, because it is further evidence that Vice
President Cheney has and continues to misstate and exaggerate
intelligence information to the American public. This
pattern, the record of which has continued to grow over time
suggests that Vice President Cheney is getting his
intelligence from outside of the U.S. Intelligence Community.
In February I asked him to clarify the basis for some of his
statements, but he has not yet responded to my request
(letter attached). I am therefore left to continue wondering
what his sources are.
alleged atta meeting in prague
Vice President Chency persists in his representation that a
leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, may have met
with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague in April, 2001.
When asked on Meet the Press on December 9, 2001 about
possible links between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, he claimed
that the April Atta meeting was ``pretty well confirmed.''
His subsequent statements on the Prague meeting have been
more qualified, but he continues to present the alleged
meeting as if it were something about which there wasn't
enough information to make an informed judgment, i.e., it may
have happened, or we don't know that it didn't happen. Most
recently, on June 17, he wrapped the suggestion in the
following verbal package: ``We have never been able to
confirm that, nor have we bee able to knock it down, we just
don't know . . . I can't refute the Czech claim, I can't
prove the Czech claim, I just don't know. . . . That's never
been proven; it's never been refuted.''
This characterization does not fairly represent the views
of the Intelligence Community. I have long been award of this
difference, and have pressed the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) to declassify their views on whether they believe this
meeting took place. Finally, a few days ago, they provided a
public, unclassified response to that question.
The CIA stats publicly, for the first time, that they lack
``any credible information'' that the alleged meetin took
place. They note that the report was based on a single source
whose ``veracity . . . has been questioned,'' and that the
Iraq intelligence official who was purportedly involved and
who is now in our custody denies the meeting took place.
Further, they assess that Atta is ``unlikely'' to have ever
sought such a meeting because of the substantial risk that it
would have involved. The full CIA response is attached.
As we learned Tuesday, the 9/11 Commission reviewed all of
the intelligence, including investigations by both U.S. and
Czech officials, and indeed all of the intelligence that the
Vice President received, and stands by its conclusion that
the meeting did not occur.
The CIA and 9/11 Commission staff statements are not
equivocal; while it is impossible to disprove a negative,
after a systematic and thorough review of the evidence it is
their judgment that the meeting was unlikely or did not take
place. However, the
[[Page S7813]]
Vice President continues to simply claim that the evidence is
some how ambiguous or unclear, and leaves out the conclusion
of the CIA. On June 17, Vice President Cheney said that ``we
just don't know'' whether the meeting took place. He went
further to suggest that the report has ``never been
refuted,'' but acknowledged that the only piece of evidence
he'd ever seen to support an Iraq connection to September 11
was ``this one report from the Czechs.'' This is the one
report from the single source that the CIA now publicly
acknowledges has been called into question.
Earlier this year in a January 9, 2004 interview with the
Rocky Mountain News, Vice President Cheney said that, after
the initial Czech report of a meeting, ``we've never been
able to collect any more information on that.'' But again,
this is simply not true: the 9/11 Commission lays out
information that was gathered by the FBI that places Atta in
the United States during the week of the alleged meeting in
Prague, and the CIA clearly had information about the
unreliability of the source as well as the refutation by the
other purported party in the meeting.
In his numerous public statements Vice President Cheney has
not been reflecting the view of the Intelligence Community on
the issue of the Atta meeting. On what information has the
Vice President been relying?
Outside of the Intelligence Community, the only other U.S.
government source of information I know on the Iraq-al Qaeda
connection, including the alleged Atta meeting in Prague, is
the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas
Feith. Under Secretary Feith has acknowledge that his office
provided information to Vice President Cheney's office on
these matters.
In the summer of 2002, Under Secretary Feith prepared
several versions of a classified briefing on the Iraq-al
Qaeda relationship. The briefing was given first to Secretary
of Defense Rumsfeld, then to Director Tenet and the CIA in
August, and finally to the staffs of the Office of the Vice
President (OVP) and the National Security Council (NSC) in
September. The version of the briefing given to Vice
President Cheney's staff included three slides that were not
included in the version given to the CIA.
One of those slides, which has since been declassified at
my request and is attached, was critical of the way the
Intelligence Community was assessing the Iraq-al Qaeda
relationship. Under Secretary Feith has acknowledged to Armed
Services Committee staff that he added two other slides which
concerned the Atta meeting issue, and which were not part of
the briefing given to the CIA.
The two slides remain classified despite my request for
declassification.
The Atta meeting is, unfortunately, not the only instance
in which the Vice President appears to have relied on
analysis other than that of the Intelligence Community. As
the Intelligence Committee report to be released tomorrow
will indicate, the CIA intelligence was way off, full of
exaggerations and errors, mainly on weapons of mass
destruction. But it was Vice President Cheney, along with
other policymakers, who exaggerated the Iraq-al Qaeda
relationship.
weekly standard article on iraq-al qaeda cooperation
On January 9, 2004, Vice President Cheney told the Rocky
Mountain News that, on the question of the relationship
between Iraq and al qaeda, ``one place you ought to go look
is an article that Stephen Hayes did in the Weekly Standard
here a few weeks ago, that goes through and lays out in some
detail, based on an assessment that was done by the
Department of Defense and forwarded to the Senate
Intelligence Committee some weeks ago. That's your best
source of information.''
The article to which Vice President Cheney astonishingly
enough referred as the ``best source of information'' says it
was based on a leaked Defense Department Top Secret/Codeword
document. Aside from the sense of wonder that is engendered
when the Vice President seems to confirm highly classified
leaked information by calling it the ``best source'' of
information, the Intelligence Community did not even agree
with the Defense Department document on which the Weekly
Standard article was purportedly based. On March 9th, when I
asked Director Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence,
about Vice President Cheney's comments, allegedly based on
the classified Defense Department document, he said that the
CIA ``did not agree with the way the data was characterized
in that document.'' He also said that he would speak to Vice
President Cheney, to tell him that the Intelligence Community
had disagreements with the Defense Department document.
The document in question was prepared by Under Secretary
Feith. It was very similar to the series of briefings that
Under Secretary Feith had provided to Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld, then to Director Tenet and the CIA, and finally to
the staffs of the Office of the Vice President and the
National Security Council in the summer of 2002.
other examples of exaggeration by vice president cheney
Unfortunately, these are not the only cases where the Vice
President, as just one key Administration spokesman, has
exaggerated or misstated the intelligence on issues related
to Iraq. In fact, they are just two examples of a consistent
pattern of such exaggeration where the policymakers--not the
CIA--were the exaggerators, before and after the start of the
war, and continuing up to the present. There are others.
iraq's mobile biological weapons vans
As late as January 22, 2004, Vice President Cheney said to
National Public Radio that ``we know for example that prior
to our going in that he had spent time and effort acquiring
mobile biological weapons labs, and we're quite confident he
did, in fact, have such a program. We've found a couple of
semi trailers at this point which we believe were, in
fact, part of that program.'' He concluded by saying ``I
would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he
did in fact have programs for weapons of mass
destruction.''
That is not what the Intelligence Community believed at the
time. David Kay, the CIA's chief inspector in Iraq said the
previous October that the Iraq Survey Group had ``not yet
been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile BW
[biological warfare] production effort,'' and that it was
still trying to determine ``whether there was a mobile
program and whether the trailers that have been discovered so
far were part of such a program.''
When I asked Director Tenet about Vice President Cheney's
comments, he said he had spoken to him about it, to tell him
that was not the view of the Intelligence Community.
aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons
On September 8, 2002, Vice President Cheney made an
unqualified statement about the aluminum tubes on Meet the
Press:
``He [Saddam] is trying, through his illicit procurement
network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to
enrich uranium to make the bombs.''
Tim Russert: ``Aluminum tubes.''
VP Cheney: ``Specifically aluminum tubes. . . . it is now
public that, in fact, he has been seeking to acquire, and we
have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring
through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are
necessary to build a centrifuge. . . . But we do know, with
absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system
to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium
to build a nuclear weapon.''
There was a fundamental debate within the Intelligence
Community before the war as to the intended purpose of the
aluminum tubes that Iraq was trying to import. The Department
of Energy, the Nation's foremost nuclear weapons experts, and
the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research,
did not believe the aluminum tubes were for centrifuges to
make nuclear weapons. Instead, they believed they were for
conventional artillery rockets. But Vice President Cheney did
not acknowledge any division within the Intelligence
Community. He stated that the U.S. knew ``with absolute
certainty'' that Iraq was trying to obtain the tubes for
nuclear weapons purposes.
Tomorrow the CIA will be properly called to account for
their failures expressed in Phase I of the Intelligence
Committee report. Phase II will follow, regarding the
policymakers' use of intelligence.
The CIA's belated public acknowledgment to my earlier
question that the Intelligence Community has no credible
evidence of an Iraqi-al Qaeda meeting in April 2001
dramatizes the need for that Phase II review.
____
Fundamental Problems With How Intelligence Community Is Assessing
Information
Application of a standard that it would not normally
obtain: IC does not normally require juridical evidence to
support a finding.
Consistent underestimation of importance that would be
attached by Iraq and al Qaeda to hiding a relationship:
Especially when operational security is very good, ``absence
of evidence is not evidence of absence''.
Assumption that secularists and Islamists will not
cooperate, even when they have common interests.
____
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, February 12, 2004.
The Vice President,
The White House,
Washington, DC
Dear Mr. Vice President: I am writing about two
intelligence matters related to Iraq: the first concerning
weapons of mass destruction, and the second concerning
alleged cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda.
On January 22, 2004, you made the following comment during
an interview with National Public Radio concerning two
trailers in Iraq: ``we know for example that prior to our
going in that he had spent time and effort acquiring mobile
biological weapons labs, and we're quite confident he did, in
fact, have such a program. We've found a couple of semi
trailers at this point which we believe were, in fact, part
of that program. . . . I would deem that conclusive evidence,
if you will, that he did in fact have programs for weapons of
mass destruction.''
In his speech on February 5, 2004, Director of Central
intelligence George Tenet said that ``there is no consensus
within our community over whether the trailers were for that
use [biological weapons] or if they were used for the
production of hydrogen.''
David Kay, former leader of the Iraq Survey Group,
testified to Congress on October 2, 2003 that ``we have not
yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile BW
[biological warfare] production effort.'' He indicated that
the ISG was still trying to determine ``whether there was a
mobile program
[[Page S7814]]
and whether the trailers that have been discovered so far
were part of such a program.''
In July, David Kay was interviewed by BBC television for a
program that aired in England in late November, and here in
the United States on January 22, 2004. In response to a
question as to whether he thought it had been premature for
the Administration to assert in May that the two trailers
were intended to produce biological weapons agents, Kay said
``I think it was premature and embarrassing.'' He said ``I
wish that news hadn't come out,'' and concluded ``I don't
want the mobile biological production facilities fiasco of
May to be the model of the future.''
On January 28, 2004, Dr. Kay stated in testimony before the
Senate Armed Services Committee that ``I think the consensus
opinion is that when you look at those two trailers . . .
their actual intended use was not for the production of
biological weapons.''
Given those assessments, I would appreciate knowing what is
the intelligence basis for your statements that ``we're quite
confident [Saddam] did, in fact, have such a [mobile
biological weapons labs] program,'' that the trailers ``we
believe were, in fact, part of that program,'' and that those
trailers are ``conclusive evidence'' that Iraq ``did, in
fact, have programs for weapons of mass destruction?''
I would be pleased to receive that information on an
unclassified or classified basis.
With respect to the second intelligence issue, during your
interview with the Rocky Mountain News on January 9, 2004,
you recommended a source of information relative to the issue
of whether there was a relationship between al Qaeda and
Iraq: ``One place you ought to look is an article that
Stephen Hayes did in the Weekly Standard here a few weeks
ago, that goes through and lays out in some detail, based on
an assessment that was done by the Department of Defense and
was forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee some weeks
ago. That's your best source of information''
That article states that it is based on ``a top secret U.S.
government memorandum'' prepared by the Defense Department,
which was purportedly leaked to the Weekly Standard. The
article then goes on to describe in detail and quote
extensively from the document it says was leaked.
On October 15, 2003, the Defense Department had issued a
News Release about the article that seems to disagree with
what you said. According to the Defense Department, ``News
reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new
information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and
Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are
inaccurate.''
Furthermore, the DOD news release noted that the
``classified annex'' sent by the Defense Department to the
Senate Intelligence Committee ``was not an analysis of the
substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al
Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions.''
I would appreciate if you would advise whether you were
quoted accurately.
I look forward to your reply.
Sincerely,
Carl Levin,
Ranking Member.
Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence
of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. CHAMBLISS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Coleman). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
[...]
