Reply #79: Part of the answer to the '2 reports' thing [View All]

is that last October the public and Congress (publicly) were shown the declassified 'summary', selected bits to support aWol. Senators had to lean on Tenet (?) to squeeze more info out, since they, particularly Graham and Levin, and seen the goods in closed hearings and knew there was selective distortion. Bob Graham finally got a letter in a few days from Tenet saying, actually admitting:

snip
These are some of the reasons why we did not include our classified judgments on Saddam's decisionmaking regarding the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in our recent unclassified paper on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Viewing your request with those concerns in mind, however, we can declassify the following from the paragraphs you requested:

Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States.

Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with Iraq's unsuccessful attempt at a terrorist offensive in 1991, or CBW.

Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.

Regarding the 2 October closed hearing, we can declassify the following dialogue:

Senator Levin: . . . If (Saddam) didn't feel threatened, did not feel threatened, is it likely that he would initiate an attack using a weapon of mass destruction?

Senior Intelligence Witness: . . . My judgment would be that the probability of him initiating an attack--let me put a time frame on it--in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now, the likelihood I think would be low.

Senator Levin: Now if he did initiate an attack you've . . . indicated he would probably attempt clandestine attacks against us . . . But what about his use of weapons of mass destruction? If we initiate an attack and he thought he was in extremis or otherwise, what's the likelihood in response to our attack that he would use chemical or biological weapons?

Senior Intelligence Witness: Pretty high, in my view.

snip

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2002/10/dci100702.html