Prewar statements by Cheney under scrutiny
Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON -- Unlike CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who have taken responsibility and ex-pressed regret for allowing President Bush to make an erroneous claim in his State of the Union address, Vice President Dick Cheney in recent days has staked out an unapologetic defense of the war in Iraq.

Last week, the president took personal responsibility for the claim that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Africa, an assertion that rested partly on forged documents. But a day later, Cheney was basking in applause during a speech to conservative state legislators with a line suggesting little doubt about the war's justifications or results.

"In Iraq, a dictator with a deep and bitter hatred of the United States -- who built, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction and cultivated ties to terrorists -- is no more," Cheney said.


As the White House fends off questions about whether the administration misused prewar intelligence, lawmakers and analysts are increasingly scrutinizing the role played by Cheney. Some are asking if Cheney, one of the most powerful figures in the administration and perhaps the most influential vice president in history, went too far in making the case for war.

Cheney has drawn attention for several reasons, among them his prewar visits to CIA analysts, which some say pressured those analysts to exaggerate the Iraqi threat; his involvement in the claim that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger; and his strong prewar statements, some of which are now in question, on Iraq's weapons programs.

Critics say Cheney's role may have helped mask significant disputes within the U.S. intelligence community. Those disputes have been raised anew given the failure to find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq or evidence of a reconstituted nuclear weapons program.

Officials at the CIA and the vice president's office have explained Cheney's personal visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., as a healthy indication of his attention to their work, and not an attempt to skew conclusions to fit a policy goal of toppling Saddam Hussein.

The vice president was accompanied by his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on the visits, which supplemented the daily intelligence briefings for Cheney and those he attends with Bush.

"He's got a deep interest in intelligence and engages actively with our folks on it," one CIA official said. "That is something which we welcome."

But Greg Thielmann, who retired in September as director of strategic, proliferation and military affairs in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said he saw no similar curiosity from Cheney about the State Department's intelligence shop, known as INR.

That agency was far more skeptical than the CIA about claims that Iraq possessed threatening weaponry.

"One would think if Cheney was on some sort of noble pursuit of the truth and really wanted to get into details, he would have noticed that INR had very loud and lengthy dissents on some critical pieces of Iraq intelligence," Thielmann said.

"You'd think he might want to hear from us," he added. "It never happened, of course, because Cheney wasn't engaged in an academic search for truth."

The State Department bureau concluded last October that there was no compelling evidence Iraq had rebuilt its nuclear weapons program, according to recently declassified portions of a National Intelligence Estimate, a top-level synthesis of U.S. intelligence reports.

INR also characterized as "highly dubious" claims that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Africa. "We thought the nuclear section of the estimate was so flawed that we thought we needed to have a whole special treatment of it to explain our views," Thielmann said.

An official in Cheney's office said CIA analysts offered the government's most authoritative information on Iraq and other intelligence matters, and dismissed the State Department's dissent as a small minority view in the intelligence community. Cheney's office also declined to specify how many times the vice president visited with analysts, or to describe what was discussed.

But some say Cheney's visits contributed to an atmosphere that pressured the CIA to conform with an administration policy bent on regime change in Iraq.

"These visits were unprecedented," wrote three Democratic members of Congress in a July 21 letter to Cheney. "Normally, vice presidents, yourself included, receive regular briefing from (the) CIA in your office and have a CIA officer on permanent detail. There is no reason for the vice president to make personal visits to CIA analysts."

Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, said two weeks ago at a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee that he knew of "at least three" intelligence analysts who said they felt pressured to draw dramatic conclusions about Iraq.

A senior intelligence official said Cheney may have not intended to apply pressure. "But whatever (Cheney) was saying, analysts certainly felt there was pressure," the official said. "There was an outcome, and they were being driven to get stuff to support that outcome."

In the year preceding the war, unclassified CIA intelligence assessments provided to Congress went from expressing low-level concern about Iraq's weapons capability to expressing the same information in "alarmist" terms, said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

At the same time, officials including Cheney began voicing their views of Iraq's illegal weapons in more certain terms.

Regarding nuclear weapons, Cheney said in a speech last August to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." Yet that was a less-than-unanimous view in the intelligence community.

Cheney's role in the controversial uranium claim began in early 2002, when his aides acknowledge that he asked the CIA about sketchy intelligence reports indicating that Iraq may have sought the material from Niger for a nuclear bomb.

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent by the CIA to check out the report and was told of Cheney's interest. He concluded that there was too much oversight from an international consortium for the sale to have occurred, and that is what he reported back.

"The vice president's office asked a serious question," Wilson wrote in a newspaper account last month. "I was asked to help formulate the answer."

Tenet and Cheney's office said the vice president was never briefed on the results of Wilson's trip, or even of the CIA's doubts about the claim.

Cheney also apparently did not know that Tenet had telephoned a Bush aide and sent two memos to White House officials asking them to remove the uranium reference from a speech Bush gave in Cincinnati on Oct. 7. The White House revealed the existence of the memos on July 22.

"I don't think he was aware the CIA had pulled that out of the Cincinnati speech," the Cheney aide said.

Cheney was among those who reviewed the president's State of the Union address before Bush delivered it Jan. 28. But Cheney knew nothing of the CIA's doubts about the uranium claim so it raised no red flags, the official said.

Some outside the administration find it hard to believe Cheney could be so deeply enmeshed in intelligence issues but be left out of the loop regarding the uranium claim, especially because it was a subject in which Cheney took interest.

"The vice president became very interested in this whole story of (uranium) coming from Africa to Iraq," said Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president. "I can't believe that the CIA did not provide to the vice president, since he was the one that requested it, all the information that they gathered about Niger."

Before the war, Cheney also emphasized as a "fact" that Iraq had imported high-strength aluminum tubes needed for a restarted nuclear weapons program. The same day last September that The New York Times ran a story on the tubes, attributed to unnamed Bush administration officials, Cheney appeared on "Meet the Press."

Citing the newspaper story, Cheney said: "It's now public that, in fact, (Saddam) has been seeking to acquire ... the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge" needed to enrich uranium for a bomb.

But according to information declassified last month, the State Department's INR cited technical experts at the Energy Department "who have concluded that the tubes Iraq seeks to acquire are poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges to be used for uranium enrichment."

The "alternative view" expressed in a National Intelligence Estimate last year said it was "far more likely" the tubes were intended for the production of artillery rockets.

Cheney's backers say he never misled the public or went beyond the majority views of the intelligence community at the time of his comments. And they insist that the use or misuse of intelligence to justify war will likely fizzle as an issue with voters.

And Cheney has been adept in defending the administration politically. In a speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute two weeks ago, he emphasized the point that a murderous dictator had been stopped.



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