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Sources: Tenet says he never read final draft of Bush speech

WASHINGTON (CNN) --CIA Director George Tenet has acknowledged to a Senate committee that he never read the final draft of President Bush's State of the Union address, sources told CNN.
The Senate Intelligence Committee held the closed hearing Wednesday amid growing criticism of Bush's speech of January 28, which came just weeks before the start of the war in Iraq.
At the center of the controversy is an allegation in the address that the British government had learned Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Africa. Uranium can be used in a nuclear weapons program.
An intelligence report saying Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain uranium from Niger turned out to be false.
Citing U.S. doubts about the report's accuracy, Tenet said last week he should not have allowed Bush's speech to retain the reference.
Some Democrats have used the issue to question whether the Bush administration tried to win support for the Iraq war by using questionable intelligence.
The CIA chief testified Wednesday that some deputies had seen the draft of the speech before Bush's address, according to sources who attended the hearing.
In five hours of testimony, Tenet also talked extensively about who the CIA talked to at the National Security Council about the questionable intelligence report, said the sources, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Tenet left the hearing without commenting to reporters.
After the hearing, the committee's two top senators vowed to find out what happened.

Chairman: 'Mistakes made'
"I think there were mistakes made all up along the chain," committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, said. "We will take this where it leads us."
He said the committee may call other members of the Bush administration to testify.
Committee Vice Chairman Sen. John "Jay" Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, said: "I think that responsibility has to be taken by a lot more than George Tenet.
"I think we have to face up to that. I think there are others in the administration who knew something about this."
Roberts said Tenet described the matter as a "serious error." He said Tenet told the committee that "had he been aware of the information, he would have taken it out and that he bears the primary responsibility."
Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Georgia, another member of the Senate committee, said Tenet fielded every question "submitted to him in a professional manner."
"He doesn't back off from tough questions," Chambliss said.
Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Indiana, also a panel member, said, "He basically said, 'Look, mistakes were made, and I take responsibility for those mistakes.' "
But Bayh said the committee must "get to the bottom of how did this happen," and that the "credibility of our country, the credibility of our president" is at stake.
The House Intelligence Committee is expected to hold a public hearing next week on intelligence matters related to Iraq.
In March, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog group, dismissed as forgeries documents that said Iraq had tried to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger.
This month former Ambassador Joseph Wilson said the CIA sent him to Niger to check out the uranium allegations. He said he reported back that the claims were bogus -- nearly a year before the State of the Union address.
Also this month, the White House released a statement acknowledging: "We now know that documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger had been forged.
"The other reporting that suggested Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa is not detailed or specific enough for us to be certain that such attempts were in fact made," the statement said.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintains that his government had separate sources for the alleged Iraqi resumption of uranium trade with Niger and that it did not rely on the forged documents.

N. Korea amenable to 3-party discussion

By Glenn Kessler
The Washington Post

July 17, 2003

WASHINGTON -- After intensive diplomacy by the Chinese government, North Korea has indicated it is willing to discuss its nuclear weapons programs with the United States in three-party talks, apparently ending its insistence that any future meeting must start with bilateral discussions, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Since the crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions erupted in October, the United States and North Korea have met only once--in April--with Chinese delegates participating. The Bush administration has pressed for any future meeting to also include South Korea and Japan, while North Korea has demanded one-on-one talks with the United States as part of any multilateral discussion.

The impasse has deeply worried North Korea's neighbors, who have grown anxious as Pyongyang has appeared to be moving rapidly to assemble a nuclear arsenal.

The Chinese have suggested the three-way talks as a route out of the standoff. U.S. officials said Wednesday that they would continue to push for five-party talks, though they have not ruled out agreeing to a three-way meeting.

"We think five is the right formula and will keep pressing for that," a senior State Department official said.

North Korea offered a proposal to end the crisis at the last meeting, so the United States would be expected to make a counteroffer at any future encounter. Bush administration officials, however, have not agreed on a precise formula.

The developments this week have highlighted the increasingly visible role the Chinese have taken in attempting to resolve the crisis.

Secretary of State Colin Powell telephoned China's foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, Tuesday to consult on China's efforts. And a senior Chinese official who recently spent four days in Pyongyang is to arrive in Washington later this week for discussions with Powell and other U.S. officials.

"China is moving. They are working on it," said a South Korean official, noting that China provides the bulk of oil and additional food aid to the impoverished North Korea. "If North Korea rejects dialogue now, China will be unhappy."

North Korea has repeated the claim it made in April that it has reprocessed spent fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium. South Korean and U.S. intelligence agencies have said they have found evidence suggesting North Korea has at the very least begun reprocessing, according to reports.

The reprocessing of nuclear fuel means that North Korea has crossed the "red line" that prompted the Clinton administration to begin preparations to bomb North Korean facilities in 1994, a plan called off by a last-minute agreement.

"Even if they've crossed the red line, all we can do is talk," the South Korean official said.

The Bush administration has said it will use a combination of negotiation and pressure to get North Korea to dismantle its nuclear arms program.

But talks have been stalled since the first session April 25 in Beijing.

North Korea, meanwhile, has declared its intention to "defend itself" with the "ultimate weapon."

Analysts are warily watching two upcoming dates--the anniversary of the Korean War armistice, which was reached on July 27, 1953, and the anniversary of North Korea's founding on Sept. 9--to see whether the North will announce itself to be a nuclear power, which could be followed by a nuclear test to prove it.

The tension between the two Koreas was evident again early Thursday when soldiers on either side of the demilitarized zone exchanged several rounds of machine gun fire. South Korea said its troops suffered no casualties, but it is not known whether any North Koreans were hit.

Exchanges of fire across the DMZ are rare.

July 17, 2003
Lack of Pre-9/11 Sources to Be Cited as Intelligence Failure
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, July 16 - American intelligence agencies failed to obtain reliable human sources inside the Afghanistan training camps run by Al Qaeda before the September 2001 attacks, according to government officials who have read an unreleased Congressional report on intelligence lapses in the months before the hijackings.
The absence of such sources left counterterrorism officials largely blind to Osama bin Laden's specific intentions before the attacks and contributed to what the joint intelligence committees concluded in their report was a lack of knowledge about Al Qaeda even as the agencies for years collected information that showed the terror network hoped to strike inside United States.
The failure of human intelligence is a new finding from a report that, according to some people who have read it, will provide many important new insights into the activities of American intelligence agencies before the attacks. Other officials, including some from intelligence agencies criticized in the report, said it would shed little new light on the events leading up to the attacks.
The Central Intelligence Agency has long disputed having had problems obtaining high quality human intelligence in Afghanistan. Asked to comment on the report's findings, a C.I.A. spokesman referred to testimony by George J. Tenet, the agency's director, last Oct. 17. Mr. Tenet said the agency put in place in 1999 an intelligence collection program against Mr. bin Laden. The operation included "a blend of aggressive human source collection - both unilateral and with foreign partners - and technical collection." The result, Mr. Tenet said, was "a large stable of assets."
The nearly 900-page joint committee report is scheduled to be made public on July 24 after months of delays caused by disagreements over how much of it could be declassified. The report is based on a lengthy inquiry that included nine public hearings and 13 closed sessions conducted last year by a joint panel of the House and Senate intelligence committees.
The report, which has been sent to the government's printing office, is the product of months of sometimes rancorous negotiations between the committee's staff, the Bush administration and intelligence agencies cited in the reports, among them the C.I.A., the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency.
Nearly one entire section of the report, describing the actions of foreign governments in advance of the attacks, has been cut from the final report at the insistence of the intelligence agencies, officials said. Unlike most other government intelligence reports, how much has been edited out will be publicly known because the final report shows the deleted material, with the actual words blacked out by a marker.
"It's a solid report," said Eleanor Hill, the staff director of the investigation who supervised the writing of the report.
Referring to the lengthy negotiations, Ms. Hill said: "We prevailed on some issues. They prevailed on others, and there were some areas in which I felt they could have declassified more information. But in general it will give the public a pretty clear picture."
Some mysteries from after the attacks will apparently remain, like the question of how 15 young men from Saudi Arabia could join in a suicide conspiracy to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon without the knowledge of the Saudi government.
Congressional officials had hoped that the report would provide the first authoritative assessment of whether Saudi Arabia played any role, even unwittingly. But the intelligence agencies were aggressive in their efforts to limit how much the report would disclose about the issue.
Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who was chairman of the Senate intelligence committee during the inquiry, has said that the question of the role of Saudi Arabia and other countries will remain secret.
In an appearance on Monday on CNN, Mr. Graham said in response to a question that the report would provide only "very shrouded coverage of the role played by foreign governments." Mr. Graham, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, added, "Unless there is a change at the White House between now and the release day of this report, the American people will again be denied access to information that in my judgment they deserve to have."
After last year's hearings, the committee concluded that the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. had missed warning signals of the attacks and focused too much attention on threats overseas rather than on the possibility of an attack in the United States. The hearings provided a much fuller account of the hijacking plot and 19 hijackers than the Bush administration has ever revealed.
In part, the tone of the debate over the final report mirrors the disagreements between the committee staff and intelligence agencies that raged throughout the inquiry when a series of combative and critical interim reports by Ms. Hill's staff infuriated senior officials at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.
As a result, the pending release of the final report has stirred further anxiety within the government. For their part, representatives of intelligence agencies said they made no effort to protect their agencies from embarrassment, but sought to keep information out of the report only when it threatened to compromise intelligence sources and collection methods.
One official who has read the report said counterterrorism officials regularly complained about the absence of human intelligence from the Afghanistan camps, saying that counterterrorism analysts were forced to rely on reports from foreign intelligence services, satellite imagery and intercepted communications, none of which detected any advance sign of the impending attacks.
"We had amazing satellite pictures of them having graduation ceremonies at the camps, but we never had a clue what they planned to do when they left Afghanistan," one official said.

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY - BORDER SECURITY

July 15, 2003 - 8:32 p.m.
Spy Drones May Soon Patrol the Southern Border Skies
By Jeremy Torobin, CQ Staff Writer

Bureau of Customs and Border Protection agents on the U.S.-Mexican border could soon receive Pentagon training in the use of the kind of pilotless drones the U.S. military has deployed Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Tom Ridge and other senior DHS officials have repeatedly backed the idea of using so-called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to help patrol remote stretches of the border.
And while discussion of potential domestic applications for military-style UAVs has been going on for several months - Ridge told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in April he planned to launch a demonstration project to test the UAVs sometime this year - details of DHS' plans have been hard to come by.
On Monday, Deputy DHS Secretary Gordon R. England, a former Navy secretary, shed some light on the agency's plans, reportedly telling a UAV trade show near Baltimore that he has asked the Defense Department to send some UAVs to the southern border to allow DHS agents to "gain some experience, some background, some hands on with the technology," according to the Pentagon-run American Forces Press Service.
Dennis H. Murphy, a spokesman for DHS' Border and Transportation Security Directorate, confirmed Tuesday that the exercise and others like it are in the works, but he had no information on when the tests might begin.
"I don't have a specific time line but we're aggressively moving forward with looking at this as a possibility," Murphy said. "We would use [the UAVs] for surveillance purposes . . . We want to gain some experience and certainly the military are the experts."
Robert C. Bonner, who runs the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, told the House Select Committee on Homeland Security on June 16 that the agency would like to launch a pilot project "as soon as we can."
He said DHS will be working with the military and with the Pentagon's Joint Task Force 6, based at Fort Bliss, Texas, to "pilot and actually demonstrate the capabilities of the UAV for better detection capability in terms of the movement of people unlawfully entering our country, illegal aliens, as well as potentially drug smugglers."
Minority Report
Most experts say that as long as military personnel stick to training DHS agents and do not actually operate the flying robots, the Pentagon would not run afoul of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from engaging directly in civilian law enforcement.
But Gene Healy, senior editor for the libertarian Cato Institute, suggested that posse comitatus isn't really the point.
"Whether or not the Posse Comitatus Act is violated, and it's probably not in these cases, it is problematic . . . that we start thinking of the military as sort of a first responder in homeland security rather than an absolute last resort," Healy said.

Bush: U.S. Working Hard to Find Iraq WMD
Tue Jul 15, 4:11 AM ET

By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON - President Bush, facing questions about his credibility, says the United States is working overtime to prove Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded Iraq.

"When it's all said and done," Bush said Monday, "the people of the United States and the world will realize that Saddam Hussein had a weapons program."

Bush has been on the defensive since the administration acknowledged it could not document his State of the Union claim in January that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium in Africa to develop nuclear weapons.

That claim was based on British intelligence that had been called into question by the CIA, and the agency's director, George Tenet, has accepted responsibility for not seeking removal of the statement from Bush's speech.

Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, accused Bush of deception. "He deceived the American people by allowing into a State of the Union speech - at a critical point when he was making the case for war with Iraq - a statement that he either knew was wrong or should have known was wrong."

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., said administration officials "should be reminded that what is at stake is not just the credibility of one man or even the credibility of the office of the president of the United States. What we place in the balance is the credibility of the United States as a nation and as leader of the free world."

Bush said the United States was reviewing documents and interviewing Iraqis in an intensive effort to support the still unproven claim that Saddam had forbidden weapons.

The embarrassing episode about questionable intelligence forced the administration to concede it did not know the source of the British claims - and, in fact, was not trying to determine the source.

"We don't know if it's true but nobody - but nobody - can say it was wrong," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.  "That is not known."

Administration officials said Bush's statement was technically correct since he was simply saying that British intelligence said something was true. In the Jan. 28 speech, Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Anti-war advocacy groups launched a television advertising campaign accusing Bush of misleading Americans about Iraq's nuclear ambitions. The ad ends with the word "leader" superimposed on Bush's face, and then the word changes to "misleader."

Defending his administration, Bush said, "I think the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence. And the speeches I have given were backed by good intelligence.

"And I am absolutely convinced today, like I was convinced when I gave the speeches, that Saddam Hussein developed a program of weapons of mass destruction and that our country made the right decision."

The administration said the questionable intelligence claim was simply one piece in a long, documented list of evidence showing that Iraq was trying to acquire material for nuclear weapons.

Said Fleischer, "The fact of the matter is whether they sought it from Africa or didn't seek it from Africa doesn't change the fact that they were seeking to reconstitute a nuclear program."

The White House also drew a distinction between the way Bush handled intelligence claims about Iraq in a speech he gave in Cincinnati last October compared with his State of the Union address in January.

In October, acting on Tenet's suggestion, Bush excised a sentence about Iraq seeking a specific quantity of uranium from Niger, Fleischer said. Yet, several months later, Bush went ahead and raised the claim about seeking uranium in Africa.

Fleischer said it was an apples-and-oranges difference because the Cincinnati speech mentioned Niger while the State of the Union speech talked about all of Africa, and that there was different reporting from the CIA. "So it's an apple in Cincinnati and an orange in the State of the Union," he said. "The two do not compare that directly."

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY - INTELLIGENCE
July 11, 2003 - 7:36 p.m.
Lack of Training Could Hobble Legions of New Intelligence Analysts
By Jim McGee CQ Staff Writer

Nearly two years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks exposed gaps in intelligence agencies' ability to detect terrorist threats, Congress and the Bush administration are moving forward with ambitious plans to hire and train armies of intelligence analysis at federal agencies.
But in the face of new indications that even the best intelligence agencies may need years to improve the overall quality of their analytical work, experts warn that the current build-up faces one fundamental question: Who will train the analysts?
"We have a lot more problems in intelligence training than intelligence analysis," said Marilyn Peterson, a senior official with the New Jersey Department of Criminal Justice.
Peterson has taught advanced courses in analysis at the FBI Academy, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Ga., and at police agencies throughout the United States and England.
In June, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a fiscal 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act report chiding the intelligence agencies for dwelling on acquiring expensive new technologies to collect more information while dragging their feet on the less costly, but equally urgent, task of growing a much larger cadre of analysts to find, with needle-like precision, terrorist plots hidden in the haystacks of data gathered by satellites and spies.
"The formal training analysts receive remains brief and uneven across the [intelligence] community," the report said. "More emphasis must be placed on analyst training, on consistent career development, and on better mentoring."
Appropriating large sums so that intelligence agencies can hire hundreds of new analysts does not ensure the agencies will do a better job of connecting the dots of future terrorist plots, said Robert David Steele, a former CIA officer who has published two books on intelligence reform.
Steele now runs OSS.net, Inc., a consulting firm that provides intelligence training to federal agencies and corporations.
"If you start with mediocre trainers, you are going to end up with mediocre analysts," Steele said in an interview.
While an increasing number of universities offer basic courses in intelligence analysis, the post-9/11 trend is for large agencies like the FBI to build or expand their own in-house training programs.
But these efforts have to overcome a legacy of neglect.
"Very few agencies are able to teach analysis because they don't know how or haven't developed the internal cadre of 'experts' to teach it," said Peterson, who has written a standard text on intelligence analysis.
The chiefs of all the U.S. intelligence agencies are publicly committed to improving intelligence analysis - and have been for years.
In 2000, in response to intelligence failures that long pre-dated the 9/11 attacks, CIA Director George S. Tenet and his agency published a "Strategic Investment Plan for Intelligence Community Analysts," a richly detailed, 10-year plan that listed "analytic training" as the first of eleven goals.
Three years later, according to the House report, "There has been little evidence ... to suggest that analytical efforts have received the primacy they deserve."
As long ago as 1998, the FBI published a five-year strategic plan that emphasized the need to expand its storehouse of skilled intelligence analysts.
Since the 9/11 attacks, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has used that same goal to win large budget increases for hundreds of new analysts.
"We are building a highly trained cadre of analysts at headquarters," Mueller said recently in a speech at the National Press Club.
Yet the question remains: Who will train those rookie analysts?
For years, Peterson traveled to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., where she taught versions of her advanced analysis courses.
The FBI also sent its analysts to courses run by Anacapa Sciences, Inc., of Santa Barbara, Calif., a firm that says it has trained analysts for nearly all major police agencies in the United States, as well as many in England, Australia and Europe.
"We have conducted more courses for the FBI than any other agency," said Anacapa founder Douglas F. Harris, who developed a set of proprietary courses in analysis after winning a 1971 Justice Department contract to evaluate the work of intelligence units.
After three decades in the field, though, Harris contends that the success of intelligence analysis depends heavily on "the goals and the objectives of the process" that shape how analysts do their work.
And in an interim report published earlier this year, the Justice Department's Global Intelligence Working Group called for a national set of "minimum training standards" for intelligence analysts.
"We thought there should be a standard for training the trainers," said Ritchie Martinez, a member of the group. Martinez also is president of the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts.

U.S. arrests Iraqi diplomat linked by Czechs to lead suicide hijacker

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published July 9, 2003

ASSOCIATED PRESS
U.S. forces have arrested the Iraqi diplomat whom some Czech officials accuse of meeting with the lead September 11 hijacker five months before the attacks.
U.S. government officials said Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani was arrested July 2. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mr. al-Ani had been interrogated but had provided little information.
The arrest was first reported yesterday by CBS News. U.S. investigators have dismissed Czech accounts of an April 2001 meeting in Prague between suicide hijacker Mohamed Atta and Mr. al-Ani.
Some Czech officials stand by their claims, the only accused operational link between Saddam Hussein's government and the September 11 terrorist attacks.
"Atta and al-Ani met," Hynek Kmonicek, the Czech Republic's ambassador to the United Nations, said last year.
Czech officials said Atta had contacted Mr. al-Ani, who was expelled later from the Czech Republic, to discuss an attack on the Prague building that served as the headquarters for U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Other Czech officials retracted the account after U.S. investigators said that Atta was in the United States during the time he was supposed to have been meeting with Mr. al-Ani.

Calls mount for rehabilitation of intelligence agencies
Improvements in analysis, more eyes on the ground, and internal restructuring are among needed reforms.
By Faye Bowers, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - Does the CIA have enough spies out stealing secrets around the world?
That's one of the most critical questions facing US intelligence - and some key members of Congress think that almost three years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks US human intelligence manpower remains underfunded.
In a stinging slap at CIA officials, the House Select Committee on Intelligence judges in a recently released report that espionage manpower is in an "entirely unacceptable state of affairs."
It's a rebuke that reflects Capitol Hill's increasingly aggressive oversight of US espionage performance.
This week alone will see the beginning of congressional hearings meant to examine the intelligence provided to the Bush administration prior to the war on Iraq, as well as the continuation of meetings of a special commission appointed to examine intelligence failings that might have led to Sept. 11, and report to the public.
"The nation's security would benefit from fundamental structural and management changes within the intelligence community," concludes the report accompanying the fiscal 2004 House intelligence authorization bill.
The most-needed reforms, according to the committee report, are in the arena of human intelligence (HUMINT in the intelligence community's lexicon). More eyes on the ground, more effective management of them, more diversity, and more advanced skills - especially in languages - are needed.
Without providing specific numbers and examples, the report points out the scarcity of spies in critical areas. And it points out that when crises occur - such as in Afghanistan and Iraq - spies are reassigned from their areas of expertise to focus on the current crisis.
The report acknowledges that the gaps in human intelligence are due, in large part, to congressional underfunding during the 1990s.
But since the mid to late 1990s, the CIA has focused on rebuilding its clandestine network. In April 2002, Jim Pavitt, deputy director for operations at the CIA, gave a speech at Duke University.
"I have more spies stealing more secrets than at any time in the history of the CIA," he said. "I ask you to take me at my word. We're stealing more secrets, providing our leadership with more intelligence than we've ever done before."
Mark Mansfield, a CIA spokesman, says he can't be specific, but, "Are we deploying more officers in the field? Yes."
And in terms of language capabilities, Mr. Mansfield says the agency is making great strides. "The number of Arabic speakers at the CIA has tripled in the past five years or so," he says. "Recruiting people with language capabilities has been, and continues to be, a top priority."
Still, rebuilding human intelligence is an involved, difficult business.
"The intelligence community will turn itself inside out" to continue recruiting more diverse and talented people, says Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst now at the National Defense University. But she cautions that the selection and training process is long and tedious.
She also points out that, yes, there has been a huge jump in new hires. But a vast number of people - with advanced skills and training ability - have taken early retirements as well.
"You've got to balance how many come in with how many have left," she says.
Moreover, she says the practice of stealing bodies for crises is nothing new. In the 1990s, for example, she says the agency created special task forces for the 1991 Gulf War, for Bosnia, and for Somalia.
"You've got to storm on all these crises," she says. "But that means you tend to miss things - like the nuclear test in Pakistan - because you don't have experienced people watching."
She also points out that the agency arranges its people around the five or so priorities that the administration cares most about. "On the one hand, that sounds logical," she says. "But my own view is that you tend to lose your flexibility. You can't be prepared when things like come out of the blue - like the nuclear test in Pakistan or Liberia."
The other area of critical concern to the House Select Intelligence Committee is communications.
"The Committee notes that information sharing within the IC [intelligence community] has improved since the terrorist attacks on the United States," the report says. "Problems and 'unnecessary restrictions,' however, continue to exist."
Getting all of the agencies within the intelligence community to better share information is taking place on several levels. Some responsibility for this has been handed to the new Department of Homeland Security. The CIA's new Terrorist Threat Integration Center is also meant to address this problem.

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY - INTELLIGENCE

July 8, 2003 - 8:48 p.m.
Police Groups Drop Plan to Snoop on Political Gatherings
By Jim McGee, CQ Staff Writer

Facing behind-the-scenes resistance from the Justice Department, a high powered police advisory panel has dropped a plan to push for the repeal of restrictions that prevent local police from sharing information on the political, social or religious activities of people who are not suspected of crimes.
Until a meeting last month, the Global Intelligence Working Group, a Justice Department advisory panel, had planned to ask for changes in a regulation that governs the use of federally-funded criminal intelligence computer networks and facilities, documents show.
Section 28, part 23 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which governs the use of federally funded criminal intelligence sharing systems, requires that unless police have a "reasonable suspicion" that someone is committing a crime, they "shall not" use federally funded intelligence networks to store, analyze or transmit information about the "political, religious or social views, associations, or activities of any individual or any group, association, corporation, business, partnership, or other organization."
The advisory panel's chairman, Indiana Police Superintendent Melvin J. Carraway, said Monday the group decided to hold off on pursuing the change because of opposition from the Justice Department.
"It was simply because we had gotten the information that there wasn't going to be any movement to change the present situation of that regulation," Carraway said in an interview.
The decision came as the group was putting the finishing touches on a comprehensive plan to forge the nation's state and local police departments into a new domestic intelligence-gathering system.
Calling their proposal the National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Program, the group, backed by seven major law enforcement lobbying groups, advocates training thousands of police officers to gather and analyze intelligence and persuading local government to establish their own police intelligence units.
"The idea behind all of this is simply to change the culture of law enforcement across the country," Carraway said
He said the national police organizations decided to move forward on their own steam rather than wait for Congress and the Bush administration to sort out the growing duplication of federal intelligence systems engaged in preventing terrorist attacks.
"We could have waited around for the federal government to answer this big question: 'How are we going to share information,'" Carraway said, but instead seized on the idea of patching together a workable information sharing system by connecting several existing federal databases.
The panel's documents say it will present a plan to Attorney General John Ashcroft in October.
Whatever shape the group's recommendations take, the project's goal of creating a unified police-led intelligence-gathering system in U.S. cities and towns is unprecedented in the American experience and, so far, has not been the subject of hearings in Congress.
Scheduled to be unveiled publicly in October at a meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the plan will add a new dimension to recent debate in the House over legislation authorizing the CIA to train local police and help the Department of Homeland Security build its own fledgling information gathering system.
"They have clearly identified one of the key legal protections that currently keeps the police intelligence squads that do exist from political and other kinds of ideological spying and keeps them focused on criminals and terrorists," said Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, who praised the group's decision not to try to change the regulation.
The working group is one part of a broader Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative that is working on ways to integrate hundreds of federal, state and local criminal justice databases into a national network-of-networks.
The intelligence section of the Global project had its impetus in the fierce political reaction to the 9/11 attacks and persistent demands from leaders in both political parties for more effective intelligence analysis that takes fuller advantage of information gathered by police.
"This is what those folks are asking for," said Michael Stanek, Minnesota's Director of Homeland Security, who serves on the working group. "They may not have called it by name, or known what they are going to get, but this is exactly what the senators and congressmen were asking for."
While the group has labored over the details of professional standards and how to train intelligence analysts, minutes of their meetings show extensive, back-and-forth debate over how best to balance existing privacy regulations with the use of powerful new technologies to exploit the ubiquitous presence of local police officers in American communities.
At a meeting of the group in April, Ann Arbor, Mich., Police Chief David Oates told his colleagues he was "excited about the proposed changes to 28 CFR Part 23, specifically the area dealing with changing the reasonable suspicion collection criteria to reasonable indication," according to minutes of the meeting.
"If the rule is passed, officers on the street can gather small bits of information that can be entered into an intelligence database," Oates said. "Under the old standard, this could not be done."
In June, those in the working group who advocated loosening the restriction won the tacit endorsement of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), one of seven lobbying groups that support more pro-active intelligence gathering by police.
But Carraway said the group was always leery that controversy over the change would detract from the mission of building a new culture of intelligence-gathering among police agencies. "It would simply be another barrier that we would have to cross," Carraway said.
Edgar contends that the entire proposal should be carefully vetted by Congress.
"I think that this is a sleeping giant," he said. "Because if there is ever to be a domestic spying agency in this country, to really affect people across the country in their daily lives, it will have to involve the state and local police in a big way."

Jul 8, 7:52 AM EDT
Supposed Audio Tape by Saddam Aired
CAIRO, Egypt (AP)

Two Middle Eastern television channels broadcast Tuesday what they said was a new audio tape by ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
"I appeal to you, O Iraqis, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, Shia or Sunni, Christians or Sunnis, it is your duty to expel the aggressor invaders from our country," the tape said, according to a transmission by Lebanon's Al Hayat-LBC channel.
The voice on the tape could not be confirmed as Saddam's, but journalists familiar with the fallen dictator said it sounded like him. Al-Jazeera broadcast a tape on July 4 that CIA analysts said was "most likely" the voice of Saddam.
The latest tape purportedly quoted Saddam as delivering instructions for resistance to the U.S. and British forces.
"Unify your ranks and act as one hand," the voice said. "Boycott the occupying soldiers ... Act and do not let the occupying forces settle down in your land," according to Al Hayat-LBC.
"He who favors division over unity, and acts to divide ranks instead of unifying them, is not only a foreign occupier but he is also the enemy of God and the people," Saddam said, according to the tape broadcast by Al-Jazeera satellite television, which is based in Qatar.
The wording on the tapes broadcast Tuesday was similar to the July 4 tape, but both Al Hayat-LBC and Al-Jazeera said they were new tapes.
An Al-Jazeera producer said Tuesday's was the first broadcast of its tape.
"It is a new tape, other than the one that we aired" Friday, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
He said he could not say how or when Tuesday's tape was received.
Al-Jazeera said Friday's tape was played to it over the telephone, which helped to explain its poor quality.
The tape broadcast by Al Hayat-LBC was about 15 minutes long but the sound quality was so poor that it was extremely to distinguish what the speaker was saying.
The CIA analysts said that the bad quality of Friday's tape prevented them from being certain it was Saddam.

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY - INTELLIGENCE
July 1, 2003 - 6:49 p.m.
Lieberman Hammers Bush on Use of Intelligence Center
by Jim McGee, CQ Homeland Security

Back in April, Senator and presidential candidate Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., wrote a letter to President Bush questioning his decision to hand management of a new interagency intelligence center on terrorism to the CIA, rather than giving the mission to the new Department of Homeland Security, as Congress had directed.
On Bush's behalf, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge answered Lieberman June 17 with a stout defense of the new Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), which will include analysts from the CIA, DHS and the FBI, among others.
On Tuesday, Lieberman fired back with a letter hammering at what he called the diffusion of accountability and the accretion of a new layer of bureaucracy that leaves the nation with at least four major intelligence centers, all outside the Homeland Security Department.
"The end result, I fear, is an intelligence apparatus burdened by the same handicaps that failed the nation on September 11," Lieberman said.
Agency spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, understandably took issue with Lieberman's view.
"The creation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center as the one all-source intelligence collecting and sharing point is not only helping DHS," Roehrkasse said, "but is helping the entire federal government share information and provide the greatest assessment of threats our country has ever seen."

July 1, 2003
C.I.A. Said to Find North Korean Nuclear Advances
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, June 30 - American intelligence officials now believe that North Korea is developing the technology to make nuclear warheads small enough to fit atop the country's growing arsenal of missiles, potentially putting Tokyo and American troops based in Japan at risk, according to officials who have received the intelligence reports.
In the assessment - which they have shared with Japan, South Korea and other allies in recent weeks - officials at the Central Intelligence Agency said American satellites had identified an advanced nuclear testing site in an area called Youngdoktong. At the site, equipment has been set up to test conventional explosives that, when detonated, could compress a plutonium core and set off a compact nuclear explosion.
Some intelligence officials say they believe that the existence of the testing range is evidence that North Korea intends to manufacture much more sophisticated weapons that would be light enough to put onto its growing arsenal of medium- and long-range missiles.
Previously, American officials had said they were uncertain whether North Korea had received enough outside technical help to even attempt the precision steps required to detonate such a "miniaturized" nuclear warhead.
The new testing capability does not mean North Korea can actually build a small weapon, but it suggests that the North Koreans are moving to combine their two most advanced weapons projects: nuclear technology and missile technology. The new intelligence reports suggest that they could develop such a weapon in less than a year, but some officials warn that that assessment represents what one called "a best guess rather than a solid estimate."
For months, Washington has been trying to convince Asian nations, especially South Korea and China, that the North Korean threat is so urgent that it requires a unified diplomatic front to force the country to give up its weapons. The new intelligence, officials who have seen it say, apparently is being marshaled to support the administration's argument.
According to officials who have been briefed on the American reports, conventional explosions simulating a nuclear detonation have been set off at the testing site, which is near North Korea's main nuclear complex. North Korea has never tested a nuclear weapon, though the C.I.A. long ago estimated that it manufactured two crude devices in the late 1980's or early 1990's.
North Korea, unlike Iraq, has made no secret of its plan to develop nuclear weapons. Now, administration officials say they fear that the North is on the verge of producing five or six new weapons, some of which might be miniaturized.
"This would give them the range they never had before, and the chance to spread their threat far beyond South Korea," said a senior Asian official, noting that about 60,000 American troops are based in Japan.
The new intelligence estimates provided to Asian allies, however, left it unclear how quickly the North could produce the small warheads. The worst-case estimate, officials say, is less than a year.
American satellites have watched North Korean nuclear activity intently since late last year, when the North evicted international inspectors. The inspectors had guarded a collection of 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods, which can be reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium.
In January, the North restarted its reprocessing equipment, which had been mothballed under a 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration. But according to American officials, it now appears that North Korean engineers ran into technical problems in restarting the program.
While intelligence officials have reached no consensus, they told allies last week that in the worst case, only a few hundred of the 8,000 rods had been converted into plutonium. It would take 1,000 to 1,500 rods to make enough plutonium for a weapon, experts say.
"What we are told is that it would take perhaps six months after that to produce a miniaturized warhead and put it into one of the missiles," said a senior official familiar with the intelligence. "But after Iraq, who knows how good those estimates are?"
After the claims made about prohibited weapons in Iraq, which have not been found so far, skepticism about the quality of American intelligence is widespread. And in the case of North Korea, as in Iraq, the immediacy of the threat depends on whose analysis seems most compelling.
So far, American intelligence has picked up almost no sign of the telltale krypton gas that is released into the atmosphere when nuclear fuel rods are converted into weapons-grade plutonium. That has led some analysts to argue that the North may be further from producing a weapon than feared a few months ago.
But others note that trucks were seen carrying the rods from their storage area months ago, and it is unclear where they are or whether the United States is sniffing for the krypton gas in the right place.
"We don't believe that the main reprocessing facility has been very active," a senior administration official said in a recent interview. "But could there be a second reprocessor? No one knows for sure."
Without question, though, North Korea's abilities greatly outstrip anything Iraq had in the last decade, and the North's program is probably several years ahead of Iran's.
President Bush and South Korea's president, Roh Moo Hyun, declared in mid-May that their two nations "will not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea." But it is unclear whether they interpret the meaning of that phrase the same way.
Mr. Bush has said he wants a diplomatic solution to the problem, but would not foreclose any option, including military options. Mr. Roh has said any pre-emptive strike against the North's nuclear facilities could prove disastrous.

Pakistan President, Al Quad Member Agree Bin Laden Alive, Differ on Al Qaeda's Status

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and the speaker in the most recent videotape released by al Qaeda both indicated that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden may be alive somewhere in Afghanistan. In a BBC Television interview broadcast on 22 June, Musharraf said, "Initially, I thought he may be dead. I believe now that more chances are that he is alive...Where he is, it can be either side of the [Afghanistan-Pakistan] border. I keep saying that may be he's moving continuously...But if he is moving with a large body, then I think that Afghanistan is a better place to hide because there he is not exposed." The man in the al Qaeda videotape, obtained by The Associated Press on 21 June, identified himself as Abu Haris Abdul Hakim, and said "Osama is alive and in Afghanistan." While he and Musharraf gave similar views on bin Laden's status, they gave opposing views on the status of al Qaeda. Musharraf said, "In our region, I am very sure that the war against al-Qaeda is being won, as a homogenous body, under a command and control arrangement, they don't exist any more." The al Qaeda member stated that the terrorist network and its allies are "alive and have started operations again. And very soon will bring the Americans and their agents to justice." He warned of fresh suicide attacks in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

ANALYSIS: If authentic, the videotape, contrary to Musharraf's assessment of al Qaeda, appears to send a strong signal that the terrorist network is growing increasingly reorganized. The speaker, who spoke in Arabic, but whose face was covered, said that he was speaking for not only al Qaeda, but two other factions opposing the United States in Afghanistan: remaining elements of the Taliban and supporters of Afghan rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, AP reported, which also added that an intelligence official in Hekmatyar's organization confirmed the speaker's claim. The videotape also signaled a bolder al Qaeda, claiming for the first time responsibility for the suicide attacks in Riyad, Saudi Arabia and bombings in Casablanca, Morocco. It also sent a message to "our brothers in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir and Iraq: We will have good news for you very soon. And it will be about our supremacy over the Americans. This will be in the shape of martyrdom [suicide] attacks against Americans in the current month." This warning comes on the heels of a fatwa issued by al Qaeda calling for the killing of 10 million people-the number of Muslims killed by Westerners in recent decades-with weapons of mass destruction, the Daily Star reported on 19 June. It reportedly was written by one of al Qaeda's spiritual leaders, Sheikh Yossuf al-Ayeeri, a close friend of bin Laden, and published on an al Qaeda website after he was killed in a shootout with police in Saudi Arabia on 31 May. Al-Ayeeri was thought to have masterminded the Riyadh suicide bombings. "Young militants have now vowed to avenge his death," according to the Daily Star report.

Trucker Pleads Guilty in Plot By Al Quad
Brooklyn Bridge, D.C. Cited as Targets
By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 20, 2003; Page A01

An Ohio truck driver who met with Osaka bin Laden and other top al Quad leaders plotted to bring down New York's Brooklyn Bridge and launch a simultaneous unspecified attack in Washington as recently as a few months ago, according to officials and court papers unsealed yesterday.
Inman Farris, a Kashmiri-born naturalized American citizen who is in federal custody, pleaded guilty May 1 to providing material support to a terrorist organization in a case filed under seal in federal court in Alexandria. None of the attacks he planned with top al Quad operative Halide Sheik Mohammed was carried out.
Attorney General John D. Ash croft, who announced the plea agreement yesterday, said that while Farris appeared to be a hardworking truck driver, he "had a secret double life" that included carrying cash for al Quad, providing bin Laden with information about "ultra light" aircraft and scouting equipment for sabotaging railroad tracks and cutting suspension bridge cables.
Law enforcement officials said they immediately took steps to safeguard certain facilities when they learned of the plots, and suggested that information about Farris's efforts may have been a factor in the decision to raise the national terrorist threat level this spring.
Mohammed, al Quad's operations chief until his capture March 1 in Pakistan, disclosed information about Farris to interrogators, according to law enforcement sources. Mohammed is in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location abroad. Ash croft said the investigation of the plots is continuing and declined comment on whether other suspected terrorist cell members may be in custody or under surveillance.
FBI counter terrorism chief Pasquale J. Dammar, who appeared with Ash croft, said the plea agreement "serves to remind us there are still terrorists in our midst."
In the 21 months since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, federal prosecutors have obtained guilty pleas or convictions using the material-support statute against six Yemeni American men from Lackawanna, N.Y., who admitted attending al Quad training camps; two Detroit men who planned to aid an unspecified terror plot, and a Portland, Ore., man who acknowledged helping the Tailbone, among others.
Farris, 34, of Columbus, Ohio, who also goes by the name Mohammad Ralf, faces up to 20 years in prison. As a condition of his plea, he has agreed to cooperate with federal officials investigating al Quad.
Ash croft declined to give the date or circumstances of Farris's arrest, but court documents indicate that Farris agreed his case could be handled in the Eastern District of Virginia, which has overseen other terrorism cases. His attorney, J. Frederick Sinclair, of Alexandria, was traveling yesterday and could not be reached for comment.
In late 2000 and at various times over the next two years, Farris traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where on one occasion he met with bin Laden and his senior lieutenants, according to a statement of facts filed with the plea agreement. The papers indicate that Farris had at least one confederate in the United States who sent coded messages for him to a senior al Quad operative in Pakistan between April 2002 and March 2003.
The court papers show that on his trip to Pakistan in late 2000, Farris met with an unnamed friend he had known since the Soviet-Afghanistan war in the mid-1980s. The two traveled to an al Quad training camp in Afghanistan, where Farris's friend, described as bin Alden's "right foot" for his role in providing al Quad with supplies and materials, introduced him to bin Laden.
Farris was asked to research ultra light planes as a means of escape for terrorist operatives, a task he accomplished at an Internet cafe in Karachi, according to the court papers. He then passed the information back to his friend.
On another occasion at about the same time, the two men went to a factory and ordered 2,000 lightweight sleeping bags that were shipped to al Quad in Afghanistan, according to the papers.
A year later, in December 2001, Farris helped al Quad obtain extensions for about a half-dozen airline tickets for al Quad members planning to travel to Yemen. Early in 2002, Farris was introduced to the third-ranking al Quad leader -- identified by law enforcement sources as Halide Sheik Mohammed -- and later delivered a bag containing cash and cell phones to him, the court papers show.
Farris told Mohammed of his work as a truck driver, including his deliveries to cargo planes. Mohammed "advised him that he was interested in cargo planes because they would hold 'more weight and more fuel,' " the court papers said.
Mohammed informed Farris that al Quad was "planning two simultaneous operations in New York City and Washington D.C." He asked Farris to obtain "gas cutters" -- believed to be cutting torches -- to sever the bridge cables, and tools to damage railroad tracks. He was told to refer to the torches in his communications as "gas stations" and the tools as "mechanics shops."
Farris researched gas torches on the Internet and asked a friend about them, the court papers show. He had little success and sent coded messages to that effect to Mohammed. After scouting the Brooklyn Bridge early this year and concluding the plot would fail because of the bridge's security and structure, he sent another coded message to his unnamed friend that "the weather is too hot."
Farris admitted to the facts contained in the court papers and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and one count of providing material support for terrorism.
Layman B. Said, a Palestinian friend of Farris's who moved from Ohio to Florida in 2001, formed a company with Farris called Amines Imports in 1997. Yesterday, Said said the pair intended to import clothing from Pakistan but the company never got off the ground. He expressed surprise that Farris had pleaded guilty to terrorism charges.
"I never knew he was into politics in any way," said Said, who added that he has not seen Farris in several years.
Research editor Margot Williams and researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

Attention turns to prewar Iraq intel

WASHINGTON (CNN) --As a congressional committee held closed-door hearings on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction program, the Bush's administration remained steadfast Wednesday that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed banned weapons before the war.
President Bush also offered a strong defense of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and fended off accusations of exaggerating the threat from Saddam to justify war with Iraq.
"I'll say something right now: He [Blair] operated on very sound intelligence, and those accusations are simply not true," Bush told reporters during a meeting on Medicare with senators at the White House.
Blair joined Bush in going to war with Iraq in the face of massive opposition in his country and much of Europe.
Bush and his top aides cited the need to destroy Saddam's weapons programs as the central reason for going to war.
With mounting criticism, Bush has criticized skeptics twice this week as "revisionist" historians who he said overlook the fact Saddam is no longer a threat to the United States and the world.
Blair now faces multiple inquiries in Parliament, including some from his own Labour Party, about whether claims about weapons in Iraq were exaggerated.
Bush also faces questions from members of Congress and some former intelligence officials about the quality and veracity of the intelligence on Iraq.
The House Intelligence Committee held closed-door hearings Wednesday on how the authors of last October's classified National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iraq's WMD program was flourishing.
The hearing is the first in what could be several hearings in both the House and Senate in the months ahead to examine those questions.
Rep. Jane Harman of California, the committee's ranking Democrat, issued a statement saying in part, "The NIE is a logical starting point to this investigation. It helped frame the decision to go to war."
A Democrat leaving the hearing said intelligence analysts defended their work and blamed the inability to find weapons so far on the fact that Iraq is a big country and that the weapons are easily concealed or destroyed.
The lawmaker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had doubts. "No one ever said their weapons of mass destruction would be hard to find [before the war]," he said.
A Republican official defended the analysts' findings. "In intelligence, you can't produce proof that is incontrovertible" the Republican said. "You try to get smart people to look at the information and come up with their best assessment."
The House committee will hold its second hearing Thursday. Witnesses will include Washington-based officials overseeing the ongoing hunt for the alleged Iraqi weapons. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will hold a closed-door hearing Thursday as well.
At a Pentagon news briefing Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the U.S. and British intelligence. He said the information was "imperfect, but good."
"I think the intelligence was correct in general, and that you always will find out precisely what it was once you get on the ground and have a chance to talk to people and explore it. And I think that will happen," he said.
Saddam's regime became expert at hiding banned weapons even amid "an inspections environment in that country," Rumsfeld said. "They had a very long period to hide or do whatever it is they wanted to do with those capabilities."
Jay Garner, former director of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance in Iraq, noted the recent finds of two trucks that the United States said were made for biological weapons.
Such equipment "indicates to me that [Saddam] had that and probably intended to use it if he had been able to," Garner said at the news conference with Rumsfeld.
"He had 12 years to hide it. He was very skillful at doing that," Garner said.
Appearing before the House Armed Services Committee, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz promised the United States "will get to the bottom of it."
Noting that Baghdad is the size of Los Angeles, California, Wolfowitz said a weapon such as anthrax "could be hidden in a room a fraction the size of this one."
"You're not going to find it in a house-to-house search. You're going to find it when people start to talk to you, and we're in the process of finding the people who can talk," Wolfowitz said.
White House Correspondent Dana Bash and Capitol Hill Producer Ted Barrett contributed to this report.

The Washington Times

Lack of spies in Baghdad spurs CIA to bolster ranks
By Bill Gertz
Published June 18, 2003

The CIA lacked spies on the ground in Iraq who could detail Baghdad's weapons programs and is working to build up its ranks after years of neglect, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.
The agency is too dependent on former officials, defectors and foreign intelligence services that lack the kind of detailed knowledge that human intelligence can provide, according to the officials.
CIA sources on Iraq is one of the issues being examined by Congress as part of its probe into whether the CIA provided bad intelligence on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, or whether policy-makers skewed reports to fit their goals.
Much of the information about Baghdad's weapons came from former Iraqi officials and friendly foreign intelligence services, in addition to intercepted communications and satellite photographs, intelligence officials said.
The CIA had few agents with firsthand knowledge of weapons inside Iraq, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey said having the right agent in the right place at the right time is the best use of human spying. But he also believes the U.S. government did too little to acquire information from Iraqi exiles, many of whom were in touch with people in Iraq.
"You don't have to control an asset for them to be useful," Mr. Woolsey said. "An awful lot of people in the Cold War were volunteers and defectors."
Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress, said his group provided three Iraqis with information on Iraq's arms programs. Two were useful to the CIA and one was not, Mr. Chalabi said.
Mr. Chalabi also said in an interview that an Iraqi double agent fooled the U.S. military into bombing two purported Saddam hide-outs during the war. The CIA denies the claim.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell revealed much of what U.S. intelligence agencies knew about Iraq's arms programs in a Feb. 5 briefing before the U.N. Security Council.
Mr. Powell said the data came from electronic intercepts of Iraqi communications and from human sources.
"Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence," Mr. Powell said.
No weapons have been found in the two months since coalition forces took Baghdad. U.S. forces found two mobile biological-weapons production vans, which a CIA report called evidence of Iraq's hidden arms programs.
Democrats on Capitol Hill say that intelligence was politicized by the Bush administration to support its efforts to go to war.
The Powell presentation included references to at least 12 human sources, most of them defectors. These sources provided the CIA with details on biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, as well as missile systems.
The two biological-weapons vans that were discovered in April were disclosed before the war by a chemical engineer and corroborated by three other Iraqis, including two defectors.
The chemical-arms intelligence on Iraq came from defectors, including two human sources that were not further identified.
Two defectors were the source of information on Iraq's nuclear program, and two sources inside Saddam's missile program revealed information about Baghdad's hidden Scud missiles.
The CIA, which is in charge of human spying operations, has tried to rebuild its agent networks around the world and especially in Iraq.
The head of the CIA's espionage branch, James Pavitt, said in a speech in January that in the mid-1990s the recruitment of case officers came to a virtual halt.
"Today, however, we have more reporting on the really hard targets than I can remember at any time in my nearly 30 years of agency service," Mr. Pavitt said.
The clandestine service today includes veteran officers and newer recruits hired in the past five years, Mr. Pavitt said.
U.S. spying capabilities were sharply cut in the 1970s under CIA Director Stansfield Turner, and again in the 1990s under President Clinton.
The Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense HUMINT Service also conducts espionage. Its efforts to build up agent networks have been hampered by the CIA, which in the past has taken the best agent-recruits and contacts away from DIA.
Problems with espionage persist in Iraq. U.S. officials said CIA officers working in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities must travel with armed escorts, who critics say limit their ability to conduct spying.
CIA officers in Baghdad also carry firearms, which has led some critics to call the agency risk averse. One intelligence official, however, rejected the idea.
"Iraq continues to be a dangerous place, and CIA officers take all necessary steps to protect themselves and those they deal with," this official said. "The notion that there is something risk averse about agency officers carrying weapons to protect themselves in a dangerous environment is ridiculous."
The official would not comment on the requirement for armed escorts.
The CIA's cadre of spies is estimated at 8,000 to 10,000 people.
Last week, the agency graduated the largest class of case officers, as its field agents are known, in its history, said a U.S. official who declined to say how large it was. The large class is a sign that CIA efforts to improve spying are progressing and have increased sharply since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the official said.
Other officials said most CIA trainee classes in the past ranged from 50 to 100 people. During Vietnam, the agency's training facility near Williamsburg turned out as many as 600 spies per class.
The CIA also has launched a program to recall some experienced clandestine service veterans. However, officials said some of the best officers were turned down for jobs because they did not fit the political profile of the current agency's case officers.
Robert Baer, a former CIA operations officer who worked in Iraq during the 1990s, said the Clinton administration decided to cut back on spies because of the end of the Cold War.
"They basically closed down [CIA operations] in Africa," Mr. Baer said. "Africa was a place to send officers not for intelligence, but to learn how to do the job."
Mr. Baer said the problem with CIA spying is that the agency is risk averse, hamstrung by too many lawyers and fails to back its people when they make mistakes or get in trouble.
"People are going to make mistakes, and if they do, they need to be protected," Mr. Baer said. "It's the price of doing business."
Mr. Baer has said that during the 1990s, the CIA had no case officers in Iraq and thus no agents on the ground.
That changed after the September 11 attacks, as the CIA attempted to set up networks in Iraq, officials said.
North Korea is another area where the CIA lacks good spies of its own.
The agency is trying to improve its spying in the tightly controlled Stalinist state and also is focusing on spying in China aimed at North Korea.
Officials said the CIA relies heavily on South Korean spies in the North for its intelligence, something the agency is trying to remedy.
CIA estimates of North Korea's nuclear program were exposed as deficient in April by the private comments of Li Gun, a North Korean negotiator, during talks in Beijing. Mr. Li stated that North Korea was nearly finished reprocessing spent fuel rods that the CIA had reported were still in storage under a 1994 U.S.-North Korea agreement. The comment prompted the CIA to reassess its intelligence on the fuel reprocessing.
One U.S. official said either the North Korean official was lying or there was a major intelligence failure on the part of the CIA.

Senators Debate Procedures for WMD Intelligence Review
Monday, June 16, 2003

WASHINGTON - With Congress set to begin hearings this week into prewar intelligence on Iraq, senators are trying to come up with some consensus on how to proceed with a formal review.
On Sunday, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., held out the possibility of open hearings -- a key demand of the Democrats -- "if we think that is warranted."
As lawmakers debated the congressional reviews on the weekend television talk shows, Roberts offered another possible concession. He said hearings would likely be followed by a classified report as well as a public report, something the Democrats also have called for.
The closed hearings of Roberts' committee would consider what information President Bush used to build his case against Iraq.
The format overrules Democrats' demands for a more formal investigation with extensive questioning of witnesses about why prohibited chemical and biological weapons have not been found and accusations that some evidence cited by the administration has proved false or misleading.
Republicans suggested last week that such a probe could become politicized or harm national security. They instead favored customary oversight hearings by the Intelligence and Armed Services committees; the Senate Armed Services panel already has begun closed hearings.
Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on Armed Services, opposed the GOP approach. "We need a thorough, bipartisan investigation," he said on CBS' "Face the Nation," where Roberts also appeared.
The doubts that have been raised about some of the prewar weapons assessments go to the "heart of our intelligence," Levin said. "Is it objective, or has it been shaded, has it been stretched by the intelligence community to reach some conclusion?"
He complained that Senate Republicans are not working and consulting with the Democrats on how to move ahead with the intelligence reviews. Senate GOP lawmakers should adopt the more conciliatory working spirit in the House, where both parties' intelligence committee leaders have agreed on a similar review, he said.
The House Intelligence Committee also will start its hearings this week with two closed meetings, and open hearings will follow if appropriate, panel members have said. The inquiry will include staff interviews of intelligence personnel and updates on efforts to find weapons of mass destruction.
The House panel's top Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman of California, said there's a real need to ensure that reports from the intelligence community matched the strong rhetoric from the administration in the run-up to the war.
Harman said it is too early to say whether the administration hyped or manipulated intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in order to justify pre-emptive military action. "We're going to find that out," she said on "Fox News Sunday."
Bush and other administration officials maintain that Iraq had an active weapons program and that time will bear that out. More than two months have passed since Saddam Hussein was routed, and weapons of mass destruction have not been found.
According to a new CBS News Poll, six in 10 Americans say it is important for the United States to find the illegal weapons.
Forty-four percent of those polled said Bush officials overestimated the extent of the Iraqi weapons stores -- and of that group, over two-thirds said the administration exaggerated the weapons threat. That sentiment appeared not to have harmed Bush politically, with his job approval still at 66 percent.
The poll of 841 adults was taken Thursday and Friday and has an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Senators Debate Procedures for WMD Intelligence Review
Monday, June 16, 2003

WASHINGTON - With Congress set to begin hearings this week into prewar intelligence on Iraq, senators are trying to come up with some consensus on how to proceed with a formal review.
On Sunday, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., held out the possibility of open hearings -- a key demand of the Democrats -- "if we think that is warranted."
As lawmakers debated the congressional reviews on the weekend television talk shows, Roberts offered another possible concession. He said hearings would likely be followed by a classified report as well as a public report, something the Democrats also have called for.
The closed hearings of Roberts' committee would consider what information President Bush used to build his case against Iraq.
The format overrules Democrats' demands for a more formal investigation with extensive questioning of witnesses about why prohibited chemical and biological weapons have not been found and accusations that some evidence cited by the administration has proved false or misleading.
Republicans suggested last week that such a probe could become politicized or harm national security. They instead favored customary oversight hearings by the Intelligence and Armed Services committees; the Senate Armed Services panel already has begun closed hearings.
Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on Armed Services, opposed the GOP approach. "We need a thorough, bipartisan investigation," he said on CBS' Face the Nation, where Roberts also appeared.
The doubts that have been raised about some of the prewar weapons assessments go to the "heart of our intelligence," Levin said. "Is it objective, or has it been shaded, has it been stretched by the intelligence community to reach some conclusion?"
He complained that Senate Republicans are not working and consulting with the Democrats on how to move ahead with the intelligence reviews. Senate GOP lawmakers should adopt the more conciliatory working spirit in the House, where both parties' intelligence committee leaders have agreed on a similar review, he said.
The House Intelligence Committee also will start its hearings this week with two closed meetings, and open hearings will follow if appropriate, panel members have said. The inquiry will include staff interviews of intelligence personnel and updates on efforts to find weapons of mass destruction.
The House panel's top Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman of California, said there's a real need to ensure that reports from the intelligence community matched the strong rhetoric from the administration in the run-up to the war.
Harman said it is too early to say whether the administration hyped or manipulated intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in order to justify pre-emptive military action. "We're going to find that out," she said on Fox News Sunday.
Bush and other administration officials maintain that Iraq had an active weapons program and that time will bear that out. More than two months have passed since Saddam Hussein was routed, and weapons of mass destruction have not been found.
According to a new CBS News Poll, six in 10 Americans say it is important for the United States to find the illegal weapons. Two-thirds of those polled said they think the administration exaggerated the weapons threat. That sentiment appeared not to have harmed Bush politically, with his job approval still at 66 percent.
The poll of 841 adults was taken Thursday and Friday and has an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

June 10, 2003
Bush Again Vows U.S. Will Find Illicit Weapons
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, June 9 - President Bush said today that he was "absolutely convinced" that the United States would find proof that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons programs, brushing aside any doubts about the primary justification he offered before the war for removing Saddam Hussein from power.
The White House faced new questions today about its assertions that Iraq posed a clear threat after Pentagon officials released a declassified version of a Defense Intelligence Agency study from September. The study suggested that at least some intelligence analysts were uncertain about the state of Iraq's weapons programs before the war.
The study said there was "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."
But the study went on to cite evidence that "suggests that Iraq is distributing" chemical weapons to its military in preparation for an attack by the United States. It also said Iraq "probably possesses" chemical agents in munitions.
The White House said the study was one of many intelligence sources provided to Mr. Bush, and Pentagon officials said the study was intended not as an intelligence assessment but to help military planners think about how to wage the war. But the caveats in the study seemed to be at odds with unambiguous statements by the president and other administration officials before the war that Iraq possessed banned weapons.
As some Democrats in Congress sought stepped-up inquiries, Mr. Bush defended the decision to go to war, and he again said there were ties between Al Qaeda and Mr. Hussein's government. But he stopped short of declaring that Iraq had weapons ready for use rather than just programs to develop them.
The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said later that the administration was confident that Iraq had both weapons development programs - which "in and of themselves give rise to tremendous concern" - and weapons.
The Associated Press reported tonight that a United States government report to a United Nations Security Council committee on Al Qaeda said there was a "`high probability" that the terrorist group would attempt an attack with a weapon of mass destruction in the next two years.
More than two months after American troops rolled into Baghdad, the lack of firm evidence that Iraq possessed banned weapons in a form that could be used against allied troops or passed to terrorists is becoming a foreign policy and political challenge for the White House.
On Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence are debating how aggressively to pursue an investigation of the administration's handling of intelligence concerning Iraq's ties to terrorism and its efforts to develop banned weapons.
Democrats, led by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, who is the vice chairman of the committee, have called for a full investigation. Republicans, led by Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman, have countered that the panel should review the issue as part of its normal oversight process.
In his comments today, the president emphasized that intelligence agencies had reported for many years that Iraq had an active program to develop banned weapons.
"Intelligence throughout the decade showed they had a weapons program," Mr. Bush said after a cabinet meeting today. "I am absolutely convinced with time we'll find out they did have a weapons program."
Responding to a question, Mr. Bush said, "The credibility of the United States is based upon our strong desire to make the world more peaceful, and the world is now more peaceful after our decision."

Powell slams media on Iraq WMD reports
'No doubt whatsoever' they were present before invasion
WASHINGTON (CNN)

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday it was "nonsense" to label U.S. intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as bogus.

Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice blanketed the Sunday morning talk shows to say they were confident the intelligence was accurate and sound.

Powell, who addressed the U.N. Security Council on Iraq's weapons capabilities during the buildup the war, discussed his preparation of the U.S. argument on "Late Edition" with Wolf Blitzer.

"In the presentation I gave before the United Nations Security Council, I spent four whole days and nights at the CIA going over all the intelligence in order to make sure that what I presented was going to be solid, credible, representing the views of the United States of America, and I stand behind that presentation," he said.

Powell said there was "no doubt whatsoever" that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction prior to the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, though little evidence has turned up since then.

Powell and Rice said reports about a summary of a Defense Intelligence Agency report from September 2002 were taken out of context and provided a misleading impression of the report.

The report, widely discussed in various media outlets, said the DIA had found "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons."

Powell noted that the report did not stop there.

"The very next sentence says that it had information that weapons had been dispersed to units," Powell told "Fox News Sunday." "Chemical weapons had been dispersed to units."

Rice told CBS' "Face the Nation" that the sentence had been taken out of context.

"There is a bit of revisionist history going on here," she said. "The truth of the matter is that repeated directors of central intelligence, repeated reports by intelligence agencies around the world, repeated reports by U.N. inspectors asking hard questions of Saddam Hussein, and tremendous efforts by this regime to conceal and hide what it was doing clearly give a picture of a regime that had weapons of mass destruction and was determined to conceal them."

Rice told NBC's "Meet the Press" that another government report was issued a month after the DIA report. The second report, called the National Intelligence Estimate, "said, in its key judgments, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction."

Rice also said that the administration would welcome and would cooperate with any Congressional investigation into the intelligence matter.

Several senators -- Republican and Democrat -- have called for an investigation.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, addressed the issue on "Meet the Press."

"If our intelligence is either manipulated or if it's shaded or if in some way it is exaggerated, it is very, very dangerous for us, particularly as we go down the road and look at other threats," Levin said.

But Sen. Pat Roberts, the Republican from Kansas who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN he was certain the continuing search for weapons of mass destruction would answer all questions without an intense investigation.

Roberts said CIA Director George Tenet has provided Congress with reams of documents, and that they should be the senators' first priority.

"We're going to thoroughly review that documentation," he said. "A total investigation at this particularly time is premature."

Powell's 'killer argument'
A key Democrat, however -- House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri -- told CBS there would be an investigation, although he downplayed the significance.

"We'll have an investigation in the Congress," said Gephardt, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. "We should. You should, after any war, review what happened, what the intelligence was and whether things were done right."

"But," he said, "there is long, consistent, clear evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And I'm still convinced that we are going to find them."

Powell said that evidence had already been found.

Speaking to CNN, the secretary noted that he had shown February 5 in his speech to the U.N. Security Council a drawing of vans purported to be biological weapons labs "and voila, the vans showed up a few months later."

"Now, people are debating whether or not these vans truly are biological vans," Powell said. "Sure they are. What other purpose are there?"

Powell then offered a "killer argument" supporting his contention that the vans "are exactly what I said they were."

"I can assure you that if those biological vans were not biological vans, when I said they were, on February 5, on February 6 Iraq would have hauled those vans out, put them in front of the press conference, gave them to the UNMOVIC inspectors to try to drive a stake in the heart of my presentation," he said. "They did not."

Later Sunday, Powell told reporters it was "nonsense" to call the intelligence reports "bogus" and that "the American people are quite assured" about their veracity.

"It's the media that invents words such as 'bogus,'" he said, adding that a 1,300-person team was in Iraq hunting for evidence of such weapons.

Rice and Powell also both denied that Vice President Dick Cheney, during several visits to the CIA, had pressured the spy agency to slant its intelligence analyses to back the administration's claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote a letter to British intelligence services reassuring them the government would take "far greater care" using their material, following a controversy over a dossier on Iraq's weapons.

The dossier -- titled "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation" -- sparked outrage after it was discovered that parts of it were copied from a 12-year-old thesis by an American student.

White House stands by banned-weapons war rationale
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published May 30, 2003

The White House yesterday stood by prewar intelligence reports that Iraq had massive amounts of banned weapons, despite growing Democratic demands for conclusive proof.
President Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, deflected numerous media inquiries yesterday by citing a CIA report that concluded truck trailers found in Iraq were used to produce biological weapons. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had warned the United Nations about the mobile labs before the war.
"The president is indeed satisfied with the intelligence that he received," Mr. Fleischer said. "Just as Secretary Powell described to the United Nations, we have found the bio trucks that can be used only for the purpose of producing biological weapons.
"That's proof perfect that the intelligence in that regard was right on target," he added.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Mr. Bush made his case for war by overplaying the notion that Iraq had chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, not to mention links to the al Qaeda terrorism network.
"I do think that we hyped nuclear, we hyped al Qaeda, we hyped the ability to disperse and use these weapons," Mr. Biden said this week on NBC News. "I think that tends to be done by all presidents when they are trying to accomplish a goal that they want to get broad national support for."
He added: "I think a lot of the hype here is a serious, serious, serious mistake and it hurts our credibility."
Meanwhile, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz downplayed the importance of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a rationale for starting the war.
"For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Mr. Wolfowitz said in the interview with Vanity Fair.
Mr. Wolfowitz said another reason for the war, which he described as "almost unnoticed, but huge," was that it would pave the way for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden's rage against America was fueled largely by the presence of U.S. troops on the sacred soil of Mecca and Medina.
"Just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door" to a more peaceful Middle East, Mr. Wolfowitz told the magazine.
Mr. Wolfowitz's boss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, has steadfastly cited weapons of mass destruction as a primary rationale for the war, both before and after. On Tuesday, he said ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's forces might have eradicated any evidence of such weapons.
"It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict," he said.
But Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was "beginning to believe" that the administration's prewar intelligence reports on banned weapons were overstated.
Mr. Rockefeller, also appearing on NBC, called on Congress to probe whether the White House "intentionally overestimated" Iraq's weapons program, or "just misread it." He added: "In either case, it's a very bad outcome."
Even Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Intelligence Committee chairman, said that if the weapons are not found, "you have a real credibility problem." However, Mr. Roberts emphasized to NBC's Tim Russert that he believes such weapons will be found.
"There's not any doubt that he had weapons of mass destruction," said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican, on CNN. "The question is, where are they?"
Sen. Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia Democrat, last week accused Mr. Bush of rationalizing the war with a "house of cards, built on deceit."
Despite such complaints, the American public appears untroubled by the rationale for the war. A poll this month by CBS News and the New York Times found that 56 percent of Americans believe the war was worth the loss of American lives, even if weapons of mass destruction are never found. Only 38 percent said the war will not have been worth it.

Threat 'Matrix' Guides Terrorism Alerts
May. 24, 2003

By CURT ANDERSON
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The decision to put the country on high alert for a terrorist attack was based largely on a top-secret daily report produced by the FBI and CIA that details every sign of a threat, from intercepted e-mails to satellite photos to clandestine whispers of spies.

Running up to 30 pages, this threat "matrix" has become part of President Bush's morning routine in the fight against terror.

Each day Bush is at the White House, Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and CIA Director George Tenet brief the president in the Oval Office about threats facing the United States at home and abroad.

The crux of their briefings is the document formally titled "Terrorist Threats to U.S. Interests Worldwide," or more informally, the "Daily Threat Matrix."

The high level of threat "chatter" collected worldwide and detailed in the Matrix was a key to the Bush administration's decision Tuesday to raise the terror threat level from elevated (yellow) to high (orange). The other main consideration was recent deadly bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco that officials say point to a resurgence of activity by the al-Qaida network.

Officials say they expect the alert level to remain high at least through the Memorial Day weekend.

In recent congressional testimony, Mueller said the Matrix is produced "to ensure we are working off a common knowledge base" as officials assess threats from al-Qaida and other groups as well as individual "lone wolf" extremists and violent homegrown radicals.

The document is "a list of every threat directed at the United States in the past 24 hours," Mueller said.

Government officials familiar with the Matrix, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described it as a daily compendium of a few pages to 30 or more. Each threat is entered in tabular format, with those considered the most severe listed first.

No threat is ignored, and even known hoaxes are reported, officials say. "We put everything in there," one federal law enforcement official said.

Sometimes only pieces of the Matrix get out publicly, leading to a distorted view of reasons behind heightened vigilance for terror, officials say. Last week, some news reports focused on threats on Internet sites _ never corroborated or specific _ that attacks could be imminent in New York, Washington, Boston and the Eastern coastline.

Officials stressed the Matrix provides a cumulative snapshot that, taken together, give officials a broad picture of the overall ebb and flow of threats.

Each entry includes the type of source, such as a human informant, intercepted signal or computer e-mail. Precise details are withheld to protect the intelligence source and method, and even these general entries are given in a classified code for an additional layer of security.

Also included are possible targets and which terrorist group might be plotting an attack, if that is known, and some notes about a threat's level of credibility or corroboration. The Matrix also describes possible methods of attack and, perhaps most important, lists what government action has been taken to avert it.

For the FBI, this action could mean obtaining an emergency warrant _ Ashcroft sometimes is awakened in the middle of the night for his signature _ to set up secret surveillance and tap telephones of suspected terrorists in the United States.

The Homeland Security Department might notify sensitive industrial sites about threats to their installations. The CIA could step up efforts to penetrate foreign groups that might be plotting.

Before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the CIA was responsible for providing the White House and other government agencies with terrorist threat assessments, working with such intelligence entities as the eavesdropping National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and others.

Since the attacks, the FBI has reinforced its domestic intelligence-gathering capabilities, working more closely with the CIA than ever in the past.

The daily Matrix now is produced by the two agencies' counterterror units together at the new Terrorist Threat Integration Center, now at CIA headquarters in Virginia but soon to get its own home.

Associated Press writer John J. Lumpkin contributed to this report.

From the "Congressional Quarterly Homeland Security Daily," 22 May:

Ridge: Homeland to Publish ‘Intelligence’ Bulletins for Police Agencies, Private Sector

The Homeland Security Department is developing an intelligence bulletin on terrorism for law enforcement agencies and the private sector, Secretary Tom Ridge told the House Homeland Security Committee Thursday. Appearing before the panel for the second time in a week, Ridge said the bulletins will include assessments of terrorist tactics, recommendations on the types of precautions local governments or private companies should take, and alerts on the kinds of activities they should be looking for. “We took a look at what happened over in Riyadh and we took a look at what happened in Morocco, we talked to the FBI and said, ‘There’s a certain MO here. They’ve done things differently here,” Ridge explained. The Homeland Security panel’s hearing Tuesday was cut short when Ridge was called to the White House to meet with the president prior to the decision to raise the national terrorist threat level to “high.” - Chris Logan

Pentagon Details New Surveillance System
Critics Fear Proposed Extensive Use of Computer Database Raises Privacy Issues

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 21, 2003; Page A06

The Pentagon yesterday detailed the development of a massive computer surveillance system that would have the power to track people as never before.
It would identify people at great distances by the irises of their eyes, the grooves in their face or even their gait. It would look for suspicious patterns in video footage of people's movements. And it would analyze airline ticket purchases, visa applications, as well as financial, medical, educational and biometric records to try to predict terrorists' acts or catch them in the planning stage.
The technology does not yet exist, and no one knows whether its creation is even possible. Indeed, the very concept of what was originally known as the government's Total Information Awareness initiative raised so many privacy and civil liberties issues that, in February, Congress banned its deployment. Legislators asked for more information about the project and sought an analysis about how citizens' privacy would be balanced with the need for security.
The report that was delivered to legislators yesterday identifies the effort by a new name -- the Terrorist Information Awareness program. It sought to allay concerns about privacy by outlining policies to conduct spot audits of the data being collected and implementing technical safeguards.
"The program's previous name, 'Total Information Awareness' program, created in some minds the impression that TIA was a system to be used for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens," the Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, said in a statement. "DoD's purpose in pursuing these efforts is to protect U.S. citizens by detecting and defeating foreign terrorist threats before an attack."
DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker said the report is intended to express the agency's "full commitment to planning, executing and overseeing the TIA program in a way that protects privacy and civil liberties."
The core system seeks to create a database of public and private records that could be analyzed for patterns leading up to terrorism. The Pentagon has budgeted $9.2 million for the program in 2003, $20 million in 2004 and $24.5 million in 2005.
"Attempts to 'connect the dots' quickly overwhelm unassisted human abilities," the report stated. "By augmenting human performance using these computer tools, the TIA Program expects to diminish the amount of time humans must spend discovering information and allow humans more time to focus their powerful intellects on things humans do best -- thinking and analysis."
The report outlines technologies and related programs in the surveillance system, including programs to mine data in foreign-language communications and to gauge biological threats by analyzing data from hospitals and other sources.
Other, more speculative systems borrow from prediction techniques used in the corporate world.
One, code-named "FutureMAP," would watch fluctuations in the public markets to assess sentiment on a particular topic, "avoiding surprise and predicting future events." Another, the "Misinformation Detection" system, would analyze language and other aspects of text for false or misleading information. In 2002, the report said, some researchers demonstrated an ability to detect which companies might be the target of Securities and Exchange Commission investigations, based on public filings.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who sponsored the February bill that requires intelligence agencies to get congressional approval before deploying the technology, said the report confirmed his worries that the system may not be the best use of the government's resources because it focuses mostly on theoretical possibilities.
He said new guidelines are needed on how such data should be used. Current privacy laws protect individuals, but they apply only to the private sector. The regulations place few constraints on the government's ability to gain access to material for terrorism investigations.
"I don't take a back seat to anybody in fighting the Mohamed Attas of the world, but before we send people on a virtual goose chase, the country needs to understand what's at stake," Wyden said, referring to one of the terrorists of Sept. 11, 2001. That sentiment was echoed by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who said the report "fails to propose any specific new rules to address the concerns raised by Congress."
Privacy and civil liberties groups were less diplomatic in their criticism. The American Civil Liberties Union called it an "Orwellian program." The Electronic Freedom Forum dubbed it a "giant suspicion-generating machine."
Both groups said the initiative goes against the notion that people are innocent until proven guilty, and expressed worry that people deemed terrorists by computer programs w