Milbank Covers Some Administration History on WMDs

In an article full of quotes Milbank shows why he is the most responsible journalist in Washington.

Yesterday, Bush also expressed irritation about a New York Times article yesterday reporting that two of the highest-ranking al Qaeda leaders in custody have told the CIA that the Iraqi government did not work with the terrorist group. Bush pointed to the involvement of "al Zarqawi's network" in the killing of a U.S. diplomat.

Although the Bush administration painted Abu Musab Zarqawi, head of a terrorist group called al Tawhid, as a central al Qaeda figure, the CIA viewed him as "affiliated with al Qaeda," meaning he had associated with some al Qaeda members but had his own agenda.

The CIA "always said, 'We can't make the connection, we can't take you there,' " said a senior administration official. As for an "operational connection" between al Qaeda and Iraq, the CIA "didn't ever tell [the administration] there was one before the war."

Bush aides have given somewhat conflicting accounts of how intelligence about Iraq's weapons was used. Fleischer, asked yesterday about an inaccurate claim in Bush's State of the Union address in January that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa, said intelligence officials declared the charge incorrect "as the information was received."

But national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that "somebody may have known" the information was false 11 months before Bush's speech. Rice also asserted Sunday of Iraq's weapons: "No one ever said that we knew precisely where all of these agents were, where they were stored." But on March 30, Rumsfeld had said: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

Bush's remarks were significantly more circumscribed than his statement two weeks ago that "we found the weapons of mass destruction," based on the discovery of two trailers that the CIA has said could have been used to produce biological warfare agents. Although no actual pathogens had been recovered, Bush asserted then that "we'll find more weapons as time goes on." (More recently in Europe he made the assertion which I thought was a "Polish Joke." - EL)

A week later, Bush dropped the assertion that weapons had been found, saying instead that "we're on the look" for the weapons and that Hussein had "a big country in which to hide them."

More broadly, some intelligence officials said they were surprised at how definitive the Bush administration was in public about the links between al Qaeda and Iraq. Al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was captured shortly before the war began, told his interrogators that al Qaeda did not work with Iraq. "The people I worked with were flabbergasted by statements coming out of the White House about the links to terrorism," said an intelligence expert on Capitol Hill.

CIA officials viewed these statements with skepticism, because they came from captured al Qaeda figures whose verifiable information was often false. But they passed them on to policymakers in summaries of interrogation debriefings. That intelligence became a source of frustration for some lawmakers who knew the information cast doubt on the administration's case linking Iraq with terrorism. But because the information was classified, they were not permitted to share those doubts with the public.