IN A CONFERENCE CALL with reporters Monday, Susan Rice was asked about Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Rice is a senior foreign policy adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign who is often mentioned as a possible National Security Adviser in a Kerry White House. Her comments on Zarqawi make that a worrisome prospect.

Why? Rice's understanding of Zarqawi is wrong. Her comments directly contradict the findings of the review of prewar Iraq intelligence prepared by the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and signed by Senator John Edwards, a member of that panel.

Here's what Rice said Monday in response to a question about the Kerry campaign's "position on Zarqawi":

Our position is that he poses a major threat now in Iraq, a threat that frankly wasn't there before the U.S. invasion. But now we have got to go after him and capture him or kill him. Before the invasion, he was in non-Saddam controlled area, very minor, and didn't pose any imminent threat to the U.S., and was not in any way cooperating with al-Qaeda.

She's right about two things: (1) that Zarqawi "poses a major threat now in Iraq;" and (2) "we have got to go after him and capture or kill him."

Everything else is wrong.

Start with her claim that Zarqawi is "a threat that frankly wasn't there before the U.S. invasion." The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee review cites a CIA report, Iraq Support for Terrorism: "A variety of reporting indicates that senior al Qaeda terrorist planner al Zarqawi was

Rice also claims that Zarqawi was in a "non-Saddam controlled area, very minor." Language from the Senate report (p. 338) suggests that while Zarqawi certainly operated out of non-Saddam controlled Iraq, he was also in Baghdad:

As indicated in Iraq Support for Terrorism, the Iraqi regime was, at a minimum, aware of Zarqawi's presence in Baghdad in 2002 because a foreign government service passed information regarding his whereabouts to Iraqi authorities in June 2002. Despite Iraq's pervasive security apparatus and its receipt of detailed information about al-Zarqawi's possible location, Iraqi Intelligence told the foreign government service it could not locate al-Zarqawi.

[Redacted] al Zarqawi and his network were operating both in Baghdad and in the Kurdish-controlled region of Iraq. The HUMINT reporting indicated that the Iraqi regime certainly knew that al-Zarqawi was in Baghdad because a foreign government service gave that information to Iraq. Though the intelligence reports established the presence of al-Zarqawi in Baghdad during 2002 and the activities of his network in other areas of Iraq during 2002 and 2003 [redacted]

The Senate report concluded that "the Central Intelligence Agency's assessment on safe haven--that al Qaeda or associated groups were present in Baghdad and in northeastern Iraq in an area under Kurdish control--were reasonable." (p.347).

What was Zarqawi doing in Iraq? Here is the assessment provided by the State Department's "Patterns of Global Terrorism," released April 30, 2003.