JB

The Washington Post reports that the Bush Administration was warned in October that attacking Saddam might make the country less safe, not more. Although Saddam was unlikely to give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists unprovoked, he might do so if attacked by the United States:

[D]eclassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) . . . which began circulating Oct. 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States.

"Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al Qaeda, . . . already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States, could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct," one key judgment of the estimate said.

It went on to say that Hussein might decide to take the "extreme step" of assisting al Qaeda in a terrorist attack against the United States if it "would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."

The declassified sections of the NIE were offered by the White House to rebut allegations that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The result, however, could be to raise more questions about whether the administration misrepresented the judgments of the intelligence services on another basis for going to war: the threat posed by Hussein as a source of weapons for terrorists.

The NIE's findings also raise concerns about the dangers posed by Hussein, who is believed to be in hiding, and the failure to find any of his alleged stocks of chemical and biological weapons. If such stocks exist, a hotly debated proposition, this is precisely the kind of dangerous situation the CIA and other intelligence services warned about last fall, administration officials said. A senior administration official said yesterday that the U.S. intelligence community does not know either "the extent to which Saddam Hussein has access or control" over the groups that are attacking U.S. forces, or the location of any possible hidden chemical or biological agents or weapons. Asked whether the former Iraqi leader would today use any chemical or biological weapons if he controlled them, the senior official said, "We would not put that past him to do whatever makes our lives miserable."

The official said the judgment of last fall's intelligence estimate -- that a desperate Hussein, in hiding and with U.S. troops searching for him in Iraq, could turn to al Qaeda -- "had not been supplanted."

It speaks volumes that in order to rebut charges that it deliberately misled the public about the use of intelligence, the Administration must make public documents (which it released this Friday) that suggest that members of the Administration had tunnel vision. Again and again we have seen the Administration refusing to admit unpleasant facts about its little adventure in Iraq: the cost of the war, the number of troops necessary to secure the peace, and the length of the subsequent occupation. We now discover that it also refused to consider secret intelligence warning that the war would actually undermine the War on Terror by leading to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their distribution into the hands of terrorists.

The question that emerges most strikingly is this: Did the members of this Administation deceive the American people about the war or were they simply incompetent to run the Nation's foreign policy?