As the Bush administration ratcheted up its case for war in September 2002, senators on the Intelligence Committee wrote to the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, requesting an NIE about Iraq's weapons programs and any connections to Al Qaeda. With Congress set to vote on the war resolution the next month, intelligence officials rushed to produce the estimate.
But the Senate committee's sharpest criticism of the unclassified document focused not on changes made in haste but on the systematic alteration of the classified version.
For example, the panel cited changes made in the section of the NIE dealing with chemical weapons:
"Although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile," the classified NIE read, "Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons" of such poisons.
In the unclassified version of the report, the phrase "although we have little specific information" was deleted. Instead, the public report said, "Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents."
The Senate report also noted one instance in which a dissenting view was left out of the unclassified version.
In that example, the classified NIE stated that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, "probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents."
But in a footnote, the U.S. Air Force's director for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance said he did not agree.
By eliminating that footnote from the unclassified version, the panel said, the public NIE "is missing the fact that [the] … agency with primary responsibility for technological analysis on UAV programs did not agree with the assessment."