Ex-CIA Chiefs Rebut Bush Panel Conclusions

WASHINGTON -- Two former CIA chiefs on Friday disputed claims cited by a presidential commission that agency officials warned them that the government's leading source on Iraq's biological weapons had a reputation for making things up.

In a scathing report released Thursday, President Bush's intelligence commission found that the CIA "failed to convey to policy-makers new information casting serious doubt on the reliability of a human intelligence source known as 'Curveball.'" The commission found that several agency officers said they had doubts about the source and raised those doubts with senior leadership, including then-CIA Director George Tenet.

In separate statements Friday, Tenet and former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin denied the accounts.

"It is deeply troubling to me that there was information apparently available within CIA as of late September or October of 2002 indicating that Curveball may have been a fabricator," Tenet said in a detailed seven-page rebuttal. "There is nothing more serious or galvanizing in the intelligence business than associating the word fabricator with a human source."

McLaughlin said "unequivocally" that he wouldn't have allowed Curveball's information to be used "if someone had made these doubts clear."

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=8066496

Former CIA Chief Disputes Warning Over Iraq Data

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former CIA Director George Tenet on Friday disputed that he was warned about problems with an Iraqi source just hours before Secretary of State Colin Powell argued the U.S. case against Iraq at the United Nations, using the source's information. snip

Powell pointed to the mobile labs as key evidence in his case against Iraq to the United Nations in February 2003, about a month before the U.S.-led invasion.

Despite declarations by the Bush administration about President Saddam Hussein's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq in what has been called a major intelligence failure.

At the center of the dispute is a phone call on the eve of the Powell speech.

A now-retired division chief from the CIA's clandestine unit told the presidential commission that Tenet called him at about midnight on the day before Powell's speech and during the conversation he told the CIA chief that there were problems with some of the foreign intelligence. snip

McLaughlin said he and Tenet were not alerted until late 2003 or early 2004 when an e-mail expressing skepticism about Curveball came to light in the course of internal reviews.

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