So it seems the CIA lied when it told Congress it was giving the UN Inspectors the info they needed to do a good hunt for the alleged WMD. That means that US policy was to hamstring the inspectors, then blame them for doing a bad job.
Smart Washington insiders always release the really bad news late on Friday in the hopes that everyone will forget it by Monday.
I've boldfaced the key point in the quote from the New York Times below. This would be a major bombshell were it not for the fact that we've already had so many bombshells about Bush administration falsifications about Iraq/WMD/threat-to-the-USA not to mention false al Queda ties, that we're all a bit, well, shellshocked.
Then again, agencies that lie to Congress and get caught doing it, usually get at least a nice public grilling.
Intelligence: C.I.A. Admits It Didn't Give Weapon Data to the U.N.: The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that it did not provide the United Nations with information about 21 of the 105 sites in Iraq singled out by American intelligence before the war as the most highly suspected of housing illicit weapons.
The acknowledgment, in a Jan. 20 letter to Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, contradicts public statements before the war by top Bush administration officials.
Both George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said the United States had briefed United Nations inspectors on all of the sites identified as “high value and moderate value” in the weapons hunt.
The contradiction is significant because Congressional opponents of the war were arguing a year ago that the United Nations inspectors should be given more time to complete their search before the United States and its allies began the invasion. The White House, bolstered by Mr. Tenet, insisted that it was fully cooperating with the inspectors, and at daily briefings the White House issued assurances that the administration was providing the inspectors with the best information possible.
In a telephone interview on Friday, Senator Levin said he now believed that Mr. Tenet had misled Congress, which he described as “totally unacceptable.”
