CIA pleas for more time to locate Iraqi weapons

By: Mohamed Ali

WASHINGTON: The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet, in his first public defense of pre-war intelligence, said Thursday US analysts never claimed before the war that Iraq posed an imminent threat.

In a speech at Georgetown University in Washington, Tenet appealed for more time to find Iraq's weapons programs as he hit back at critics of the US intelligence used to justify last year's invasion of Iraq.

Under fire at home and abroad over the failure to find any sign of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, the CIA chief said: “The search must continue and it will be difficult… The Iraqis systematically destroyed and looted forensic evidence before, during and after the war.”

He warned that it would take “time and patience” to discover the extent of Iraq's pre-war biological weapons capability.

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