C.I.A. HELD BACK IRAQI ARMS DATA, U.S. OFFICIALS SAY

WHAT A LOAD OF

YOU TRYING TO TELL ME THE WHITE HOUSE DID NOT KNOW? Yeah in your dreams

The Central Intelligence Agency was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the C.I.A. failed to give that information to President Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials.
Beginning in 2000, the C.I.A. contacted the relatives and asked them what they knew or could learn about the work being conducted by the scientists. Officials would not say how or where the relatives were contacted.
The relatives told the agency that the scientists had said that they were no longer working on illicit weapons, and that those programs were dead. Yet the statements from the relatives were never included in C.I.A. intelligence reports on Iraq that were distributed throughout the government. C.I.A. analysts monitoring Iraq apparently ignored the statements from the family members and continued to issue assessments that Mr. Hussein was still developing unconventional weapons, Senate investigators have found.
C.I.A. officials said in response that only the initial test results were reported in the intelligence assessment because those were the only results available at the time. When later results were available in January 2003, they were reported to the rest of the intelligence community, the officials said. The C.I.A. officials added that nearly all of the subsequent test failures were a result of failures of testing equipment, and that the few failures of tubes were at speeds that exceeded those required for centrifuges. The agency had asked the outside experts to push the tubes to their limits in the stress tests, and so their failure did not mean that the tubes could not be used in a centrifuge, the C.I.A. officials say.
The C.I.A.'s views on the tubes ultimately prevailed inside the Bush administration. Although the State Department's own analysts issued a dissent in the National Intelligence Estimate, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell went with the C.I.A. In his presentation to the United Nations in February 2003 laying out the administration's case against Iraq, he relied on the aluminum tubes to show that Mr. Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program.
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