US scales down: Arms to arms ‘program’

And National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on NBC’s ‘‘Meet the Press’’ on Sunday asserted such weapons will be found but it would take some time ‘‘to put together a full picture of his WMD programs’’. Even intelligence officials are talking more broadly of ‘‘programs’’.

Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, confirmed on Friday that a DIA report in September concluded that the agency ‘‘had no reliable information’’ that Iraq had chemical weapons. He insisted, though, that ‘‘such a program existed … such a program was active (and) such a program was part of the Iraqi WMD infrastructure.’’

Critics contend that the word ‘‘program’’ is too imprecise to be meaningful. ‘‘It can mean anything,’’ said Mel Goodman, a retired CIA analyst. ‘‘It can mean documents, anything; no matter how benign, they will find some purpose for it.’’

Rice, in denying that the administration had hyped intelligence to rally support for an invasion, also echoed another new administration theme: that what it had said was similar to what the two previous administrations had said, and that all three based their conclusions on what the CIA was telling them. ‘‘Successive CIA directors, successive administrations, have known that we had every reason to judge that he had WMDs,’’ she said on Sunday.

Bush repeated that theme Monday when he said the intelligence had changed little throughout the 1990s. Yet W. Patrick Lang, former chief of West Asia intelligence at DIA, says he believes Saddam at some point during that decade may have temporarily put the weapons program on a shelf. ‘‘If sanctions were lifted, if he could get out from under the rock, he would probably want to reactivate it,’’ he said.

Rice said one of the key documents Bush relied on in assessing conditions in Iraq was a classified report prepared by the intelligence community in October that concluded that Iraq ‘‘has weapons of mass destruction’’.

An unclassified CIA public ‘‘white paper’’ derived from that report also concludes in its summary that Iraq ‘‘has chemical and biological weapons’’ and ‘‘has begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents’’.

But the section of the report that provides backup for these conclusions does not support them. In more equivocating language, it says Iraq ‘‘probably has concealed precursors, production equipment … and other items necessary for continuing its (chemical warfare) effort’’.

The September DIA report says the intelligence is even murkier. ‘‘There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has — or will — establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities,’’ according to six paragraphs that were declassified from the approximately 80-page report. (LAT-WP)