More Evidence Of Bush Aides' Doubts on Iraq
Analysts Questioned Most Intelligence
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 22, 2005; Page A01
On Jan. 24, 2003, four days before President Bush delivered his State of the Union address presenting the case for war against Iraq, the National Security Council staff put out a call for new intelligence to bolster claims that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear, chemical and biological weapons or programs.
The person receiving the request, Robert Walpole, then the national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs, would later tell investigators that "the NSC believed the nuclear case was weak," according to a 500-page report released last year by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
It has been clear since the September report of the Iraq Survey Group -- a CIA-sponsored weapons search in Iraq -- that the United States would not find the weapons of mass destruction cited by Bush as the rationale for going to war against Saddam Hussein. But as the Walpole episode suggests, it now appears that even before the war many senior intelligence officials in the government had doubts about the case that was being trumpeted in public by the president and his senior advisers.
The question of prewar intelligence has been thrust back into the public eye with the disclosure of a secret British memo showing that, eight months before the March 2003 start of the war, a senior British intelligence official reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that U.S. intelligence was being shaped to support a policy of invading Iraq.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/21/AR2005052100474.html
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