White House was determined to attack Iraq:Former CIA Director

Washington, Apr 28 (UNI) White House and Pentagon officials, and particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, were determined to attack Iraq from the first days of the Bush administration, long before the September 11, 2001 attacks, and repeatedly stretched available intelligence to build support for the war, says former CIA Director George J Tenet.

The Washington Post, quoting from his new book 'At the Center of the Storm,' says although Mr Tenet does not question the threat Saddam Hussein posed or the sincerity of administration beliefs, he recounts numerous efforts by aides to Mr Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld to insert "crap" into public justifications for the war.

It says Mr Tenet also describes an ongoing fear within the intelligence community of the administration's willingness to "mischaracterise complex intelligence information." ''There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraq threat. The debate "was not about imminence but about acting before Saddam did.'' In their threat briefings for the incoming Bush administration in late 2000, Mr Tenet writes, CIA officials did not even mention Iraq.

But Mr Cheney, he says, asked for an Iraq briefing and requested that the outgoing Clinton administration's defense secretary, William S Cohen, provide information on Iraq for Bush.

A speech by Mr Cheney in August 2002 "went well beyond what our analysis could support," Mr Tenet writes. The speech charged, among other things, that Hussein had restarted his nuclear programme and would "acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon . . . perhaps within a year." Caught off-guard by the remarks, which had not been cleared by the CIA, Mr Tenet says he considered confronting the Vice President on the subject but did not.

''Would that have changed his future approach?'' he asks. ''I doubt it but I should not have let silence imply an agreement.'' Policymakers, he writes, ''have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts.'' UNI XC MS HS1711