CIA Restricts One-Third of U.S. Senate WMD Report

Tabassum Zakaria , Reuters

The CIA has decided that about one-third of a U.S. Senate report criticizing prewar intelligence on Iraq contains secret information that should not be released to the public, intelligence sources said on Tuesday.

After reviewing the roughly 400 pages for classified data, the intelligence agency returned the report to the Senate Intelligence Committee with brackets around 30 percent to 40 percent of the contents to signal the information was secret, intelligence sources said.

The report examines the intelligence on Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion last year, including estimates that Baghdad had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

President Bush justified his decision to go to war by citing a threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. No large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons have been found.

A closed-door Senate Intelligence Committee meeting on Tuesday to discuss the report and the CIA’s redactions ended without any decisions on how the panel would move forward toward making it public.

"We’re going to try to vote on Thursday to approve the report. There have been no decisions in regard to the redactions," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, said.

Members of the committee disagreed over some of the proposed conclusions, which also raised questions over when the report would be publicly released.

Roberts said it was unlikely the report would be released next week — "not the way things are now." He would not identify the contentious issues.

The committee has several options to deal with the CIA’s redactions. It could reword the passages that the agency identified as containing classified information, or take the unprecedented action of ignoring the intelligence agency’s views and put out the full report as originally written.

The latter option was considered unlikely because the committee would not want to be seen as releasing classified information. "It’s always an option, but probably as a last resort," Sen. Evan Bayhan Indiana Democrat, said.

The CIA tried to preserve as much of the report in its original format as possible, but some sections contained information that revealed sources, operational techniques and intelligence collection methods, one intelligence official said on condition of anonymity.

"I think they (CIA) went way overboard. Clearly what they are doing is taking the heart of the report out of it," Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said.

Asked how critical the report was of the CIA and its director, George Tenet, who is leaving next month, Durbin replied: "I think it’s very honest and there are parts of it that are very critical."

The report was expected to be highly critical of U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but less critical of the intelligence on terrorism, government sources say. It was expected to specifically criticize Tenet in some instances.

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