   Thursday, 10 October, 2002, 11:10 GMT 12:10 UK
   CIA undermines propaganda war
   Paul Reynolds
   BBC News Online World Affairs correspondent
   The CIA Director George Tenet has become the unlikely source of
   embarrassment to President George W Bush, undermining Mr Bush's
   warning of catastrophic threats from Saddam Hussein and exposing
   disagreements within the intelligence world about the nature of the
   danger.
   In a letter to Congress, Mr Tenet said: "Baghdad for now appears to be
   drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional
   or chemical and biological warfare against the United States."
   Mr Tenet says that only if attacked would Iraq use whatever weapons of
   mass destruction it has.
   George Bush said in his Cincinnati speech to the American people:
   "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -
   the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
   Assessing intentions
   A central issue here is one of assessing Iraq's intentions. Numerous
   reports over the past few months have detailed its capabilities,
   though even some of those are in dispute.
   Think tanks have put out several summaries. The British Government
   added new detail with its own dossier. The CIA has this month joined
   in with a document of its own.
   Mr Tenet's assessment, however, deals more with intentions than with
   hardware.
   And it raises the question whether President Bush has been
   exaggerating the threat to justify military action.
   The president has, for example, made much in his speech of the links
   that Saddam Hussein has had with "international terrorist groups" and
   that he and Osama Bin Laden "share a common enemy" (ie the United
   States).
   He suggested that it was but a short step from there to providing such
   terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.
   The three Ts
   This is known as the threat of the "three Ts" - tyranny, terrorists
   and technology.
   But experts say that Saddam Hussein comes from a different background
   to Bin Laden. Saddam is a secular revolutionary socialist dictator.
   His links with al-Qaeda are tenuous at best and do not seem to exist
   at senior level.
   His support for Palestinian groups is well known and was probably what
   Mr Bush was referring to. Notorious figures like Abu Nidal (who died
   in Iraq recently) and Abu Abbas have been given shelter.
   But there is no evidence that they would be given weapons of mass
   destruction.
   Mr Bush also suggested that Iraq had developed unmanned aerial
   vehicles (UAV) and that the United States was "concerned that Iraq is
   exploring ways of using these UAV's for missions targeting the United
   States".
   It is known that Iraq is trying to turn a Czech made trainer the L29
   into an UAV but it has a range of only 600 kilometres (370 miles). It
   could hit American bases in the Middle East but not the United States
   itself.
   Propaganda war
   In the propaganda war preceding military action, government are always
   prone to casting any threat in the most dramatic possible way.
   And the Bush administration's reply to claims that it is exaggerating
   is simple - after 11 September, it cannot take a chance.
   The Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has made warnings about
   Saddam Hussein into a speciality, said to the House Armed Service
   Committee on 18 September:
   "We are on notice - each of us. Each of us has a solemn responsibility
   to do everything in our power to ensure that, when the history of this
   period is written, the books won't ask why we slept."
   Against such rhetoric, the doubts of some in the intelligence
   community do not make much headway.
