White House silenced expert doubts about Iraq intel 6 months before war

Iraq's attempts to acquire a magnet production plant are likewise ambiguous. Secretary of State Colin Powell stated to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 that this plant would produce magnets with a mass of 20 to 30 grams. He added: "That's the same weight as the magnets used in Iraq's gas centrifuge program before the Gulf War." One US official said that because the pieces are so small, many end uses are possible, making it impossible to link the attempted acquisition to an Iraqi centrifuge program."

One piece of intelligence information that seemed to go unnoticed by the media was satellite photographs released by the White House last October of a facility in Iraq called Al Furat to support Bush's assertion that Iraq was making nuclear weapons there.

But Albright said that Iraq already admitted making such weapons at Al Furat before the Gulf War and that the site had long been dismantled.

In addition to Albright, other military experts also were skeptical of the intelligence information gathered by the CIA.

"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence, in an interview with London's Guardian newspaper last October.

Cannistraro told The Guardian that hawks at the Pentagon had deliberately skewed the flow of intelligence to the top levels of the administration.

Last October, Bush said the Iraqi regime was developing unmanned aerial vehicles, which "could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas".

"We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States," Bush said.

While U.S. military experts confirmed that Iraq had been converting eastern-European trainer jets into UAVs, with a maximum range of a few hundred miles they were no threat to targets in the U.S.

"It doesn't make any sense to me if he meant United States territory," said Stephen Baker, a retired US navy rear admiral who assesses Iraqi military capabilities at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, also in an interview with The Guardian last October.

In true Bush fashion, however, the administration had long believed it was better to strike first and ask questions later.

When Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who sits on the intelligence committee, sent Bush a letter Sept. 17, 2002 requesting he urge the CIA to produce a National Intelligence Estimate, a report that would have showed exactly how much of a threat Iraq posed, Condoleeza Rice, the National Security Adviser, said in the post 9-11 world the U.S. cannot wait for intelligence because the Iraq is too much of a threat to the U.S.

"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," Rice said.