Agreed with less that 50%

I love it when you here people say that "everybody" thought Iraq had WMD, the French, the British, etc. I love it because our own CIA did not think Iraq had WMD, or at least there was not enough evidence to come to that conclusion.

WASHINGTON — As the Bush administration began assembling its case for war, analysts across the U.S. intelligence community were disturbed by the report of a secretive Pentagon team that concluded Iraq had significant ties to Al Qaeda.

Analysts from the CIA and other agencies "disagreed with more than 50%" of 26 findings the Pentagon team laid out in a controversial paper, according to testimony Friday from Thomas F. Gimble, acting inspector general of the Pentagon.

The dueling groups sat down at CIA headquarters in late August 2002 to try to work out their differences. But while the CIA agreed to minor modifications in some of its own reports, Gimble said, the Pentagon unit was utterly unbowed.

"They didn't make the changes that were talked about in that August 20th meeting," Gimble said, and instead went on to present their deeply flawed findings to senior officials at the White House.

The work of that special Pentagon unit — which was run by former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith — is one of the lingering symbols of the intelligence failures leading up to the war in Iraq.

There is little evidence that the office of special plans used information from foreign sources. Even assuming that these other countries had such an opinion, why would we trust that more than our own CIA.

And finally, why did CIA Director George J. Tenet have to apologize for anything? His office was in the right.

LAT