Acting CIA chief on offensive
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The CIA's interim leader insisted Wednesday that his agency is worthy of America's trust despite the findings of a 511-page report that slams its spying abilities.
John McLaughlin, the acting director at the Central Intelligence Agency, declared that "The American public should have confidence in this intelligence community."
McLaughlin, 62, made the comments Wednesday during an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee blasted the CIA in a comprehensive report blaming the intelligence group for providing flawed information that led, in part, to the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.
The agency compiled that information during the tenure of CIA Director George Tenet, who resigned last week.
An inquiry into pre-Iraqi war intelligence gathered by Britain, the United States' main ally in the invasion, reached conclusions similar to those of the U.S. Senate's.
However, former senior civil servant Lord Butler said there was no evidence of deliberate distortion or culpable negligence by the spy services. (Full story)
McLaughlin acknowledged that the CIA's intelligence estimate contained some shortcomings, but said the Senate report was incomplete.
"That report has no context....It is merely one small sample in our work on weapons proliferation," he said. An examination of the agency's entire body of work would have turned up "numerous successes," McLaughlin said.
The estimate was not the sole determinant for invading Iraq, McLaughlin said. "The idea that, somehow, the United States went to war because of this one document seems to me an oversimplification of the situation."
Anyone who had read the estimate cover-to-cover "would find in it ample material for serious debate," he said. "So, if there wasn't serious debate about these issues, it's not the fault of the people who prepared this estimate."
The CIA intelligence estimate stated unequivocally that Iraq possessed some weapons of mass destruction, and had the ability to produce a nuclear weapon within the next decade.
With last week's release of the Senate report, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, said, "Today we know these assessments were wrong, and, as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence."
McLaughlin's response Wednesday was that Iraq posed a "very, very unique intelligence problem," he said.
"What we are now being told -- and it's a fair point -- is that we would have had to disprove something that the entire world believed," he said.
He said he was still not sure the agency was wrong when it contended before the invasion that Iraq had been amassing biological weapons.
"We still can't explain the trailers we found in northern Iraq," he said, referring to vehicles originally described as mobile laboratories. "They are one of the mysteries."
Saddam may have been converting his weapons production from a large-scale operation to a covert one, McLaughlin said, citing the discovery after the war of "a series of covert labs run by the Iraqi intelligence service."
Asked what he would say to the families of the more than 1,000 Americans who have died in the Iraqi war that was initiated in part on the basis of flawed intelligence, the former U.S. Army officer was unapologetic:
"I've been in a combat zone, and ...I've lost friends in a combat zone in another war," he said. "Any time that happens, any time we lose the brave men and women of the American military, we are all saddened and we all regret it."
