Report cited threat in Hussein defeat

Declassified report: Iraqi leader posed more danger after war

By Walter Pincus
THE WASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON, July 21 — Last fall, the administration repeatedly warned in public of the danger that an unprovoked Iraqi President Saddam Hussein might give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists.

“IRAQ COULD decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists,” President Bush said in Cincinnati on Oct. 7. “Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.”

But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released Friday by the White House show that at the time of the president’s speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the 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.