From the department of we-all-knew-but-we're-shocked-anyway:
On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.
Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.
1 comment:
Way back before the war I read Richard Butler on his work in checking Iraq's disarming.
From all I read it seemed that Iraq did have "stuff" it was trying to hide.
A 2000 interview with Kerry
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/stories/s131088.htm
and I did not notice much of a change in Butler etc leading up to the war
Recently I read -
The weapons detective : the inside story of Australia's top weapons inspector / / Barton, Rod.
which certainly said that Chemical weapon projects had been stopped. But this is a recent book.
Re the article you linked it sure seems to indicate that Sabri was working for CIA even though an important Saddam man !!!
as does
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naji_Sabri
which says he told about chemical weapons but said NO nukes.
All very confusing as to what did happen - but to me Saddam had something
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