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Rice rejects calls for outside probe of Iraq intelligence

Security adviser admits some prewar data flawed

REUTERS
Updated: 3:52 p.m. ET Jan. 29, 2004

WASHINGTON - President Bush’s national security adviser acknowledged Thursday that some prewar intelligence about Iraq was flawed but brushed aside calls for an independent investigation.

Condoleezza Rice, in a series of television interviews, defended Bush’s decision to go to war and said the United States may never learn the whole truth about Iraq’s weapons capabilities because of looting, which U.S. forces failed to stop immediately after the invasion.

While she defended the intelligence community, Rice said on CBS’s “Early Show”: “I think that what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground.”

But she added: “That’s not surprising in a country that was as closed and secretive as Iraq, a country that was doing everything that it could to deceive the United Nations, to deceive the world.”

“When you are dealing with secretive regimes that want to deceive, you’re never going to be able to be positive” about intelligence, Rice said on NBC’s “Today” show.

She said the U.S. team hunting for Iraq’s weapons would “gather all of the facts that we possibly can,” leaving open the possibility that its findings might be inconclusive.

She put the blame for any gaps on looters and former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who she said was so secretive that “he allowed the world to continue to wonder” what weapons he still had.

Critics say the administration did little to secure sensitive sites immediately after the invasion, undercutting efforts to find the alleged weapons at the center of Bush’s case for going to war.

‘Unresolved ambiguity’
David Kay, who had led the U.S. team hunting for Iraq’s weapons, warned Wednesday of an “unresolved ambiguity” about Saddam’s weapons capabilities because of the looting of documents, laboratories and military bases.

“A lot of that traces to the failure on April 9th to establish immediately physical security in Iraq,” he told Congress.

Kay said he would support an independent investigation into the intelligence the White House used to justify going to war after concluding that it was highly unlikely that Iraq had large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, as stated repeatedly by Bush and his top aides before launching the invasion.

But Rice said on NBC that the intelligence community had already launched its own investigation — “a kind of audit of what was known going in and what was found when they got there.”

A CIA official said the investigation, headed by Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director, was still under way.

Rice said Kay had raised “some questions that we will want to answer.” But she said on ABC’s “Good Morning America”: “We will never know fully because a lot of looting took place before our armed forces could secure various areas.”

Rice said the administration wanted to get all the facts to compare what the White House thought would be found in Iraq and what was actually found.

“Nobody will want to know better and more about what we found when we got to Iraq than this president and the administration,” she said.

Whatever the outcome, Rice said, the administration would not change its position that Saddam had to go.

“The judgment is going to be the same: This is a dangerous man in a dangerous part of the world, and it was time to do something about this threat,” she said.

Copyright 2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4049012/