Only die-hard Republicans believe that the CIA alone should be blamed for claiming that Iraq possessed banned weapons, Khaled Dawoud reports from Washington Following the scathing 511-page report issued by the United States Senate's Intelligence Committee late last week, stating the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) pre-war allegations on Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were "either overstated or not supported by the underlying intelligence," Republicans and Democrats traded charges on who is to blame: the CIA alone or a clearly pro-war administration led by President George W Bush. As he will be facing elections in less than four months, Bush obviously cannot afford to admit that he was wrong on his pre- war allegations about the imminent threat the toppled Iraqi regime posed to the Iraqis, the Middle East and the US. In several speeches he delivered after the Senate committee issued its report, Bush insisted that toppling former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was the right thing, simply because he had the capability and the intent to produce WMDs. "Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq," Bush told a loyal audience in a speech in Tennessee on Monday. "We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder, and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after 11 September, that was a risk we could not afford to take," he added after touring the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where parts used to build nuclear weapons turned in willingly by Libya earlier this year were displayed. Bush said he considered the Libyan move a successful result of his invasion of Iraq, despite disagreement among intelligence experts on the level of progress Libya actually achieved in its nuclear programme. But these are arguments only strong supporters of Bush will believe. Faced with the deaths of nearly 900 American soldiers in Iraq since the war started in late March last year, and the hefty costs -- exceeding $160 billion -- that US tax payers have paid so far and are expected to continue paying for some years to come, many Americans have grown increasingly sceptical of their administration's motives and are becoming more and more actively opposed to Bush. Although the Republican Chairman of the Senate's Intelligence Committee Pat Roberts sought to square the blame of the pre-war intelligence failure on the CIA alone, he conceded in a series of television interviews on Sunday that, had Congress known before the vote to go to war in late 2002 what his committee has since discovered, "I doubt if the votes would have been there." Roberts characterised some of the points omitted by the CIA, after reviewing an advance copy of the report, as "specific details that would [raise] your eyebrows even higher." He also noted that the intelligence provided by the CIA was not different from that which Democrat former President Bill Clinton used in order to justify attacking Iraq in late 1998, after the departure of UN weapons inspectors. "In the end, what the president and the Congress used to send the country to war was information provided by the intelligence community, and that information was flawed," he said in a news conference after announcing the main conclusions in the report on Friday. Meanwhile, the Committee's Democrat Vice Chairman John Rockefeller openly disagreed with the report's official conclusion that no tangible evidence was found that the senior members of Bush administration pressured the CIA analysts to justify their desire to go to war. He said that the "report failed to explain the intense environment of intense pressure in which intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq, when policy officials had already forcefully stated their own conclusions in public." Roberts and Rockefeller said that the way the administration used the pre-war claims on Iraq in order to justify its position was the subject of a separate report, but they disagreed on when it would be released. While Rockefeller said such a report should be produced before the upcoming presidential election, the Republican chairman of the committee refused to confirm a date. Rockefeller added that, following the pre-war public statements made by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other key senior officials on the imminent threat Iraq posed to US security, and their assertions on its possession of WMDs and desire to possess nukes, CIA analysts and their outgoing Director George Tenet did not dare to disagree. Tenet, appointed by Clinton, resigned suddenly last month, and officially left his post on Sunday. In a speech Bush made in early October 2002, he said that "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists -- to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." In another speech in March 2002, Bush described ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as "a dangerous man who possesses the world's most dangerous weapons." Similarly, Cheney declared in several speeches that "we have no doubt that the Iraqi regime possesses chemical weapons. We have no doubt that it possesses biological weapons, and is seeking to develop nuclear weapons." And although both the Senate's Intelligence Committee and a separate independent commission investigating intelligence failures that led to the 11 September 2001 attacks have confirmed that they have found no evidence to support allegations on links between the ousted Iraqi regime and Al-Qaeda, Cheney continues to insist that the two are in fact linked, and that he has evidence to prove it. Interestingly, the Senate Intelligence Committee report also exposed Cheney as having carried out repeated visits to the CIA and "hammering" questions to agency analysts on alleged links between the former Iraqi regime and Al-Qaeda. Rockefeller also pointed to what he described as an "unlawful" operation led by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, who established a special intelligence unit at the Pentagon to collect information on alleged ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. He noted that Feith had openly called for Iraq's invasion in a letter to Clinton in 1998, and wondered what that meant in terms of the authenticity of his allegations. And in what amounts to an obvious scandal, the Intelligence Committee's report also pointed out the difference between the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) -- a collection of presumed evidence by key US intelligence bodies -- on Iraq given to Congress, and the version released to the public on 4 October 2002, known as the White Paper. The 28-page public document stated estimates as facts, downplayed dissent among the 15 US intelligence agencies about key weapons programmes, and exaggerated Iraq's ability to attack the US. "The key judgments of the unclassified [White] paper were missing many of the caveats and some references to alternative agency views that were used in the classified NIE. It conveyed a level threat to the United States homeland inconsistent with the classified NIE." One key finding in the White Paper was that Iraq could quickly "produce and weaponise lethal and incapacitating biological weapons agents," including anthrax bacteria, "for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operations, including potentially against the US homeland." The White Paper dropped qualifiers such as "we judge" and "we assess," and made estimates appear as fact, the report added. The references applied to claims on Iraq's possession of aluminum tubes as part of its ambition to develop a nuclear programme, mobile biological labs, unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver lethal agents abroad and alleged connections with Al- Qaeda. Most of the intelligence used to support these allegations was based on testimonies from unreliable Iraqi defectors seeking asylum or second hand, unverified reports from foreign governments, the report said. Reacting to the Senate's report, Bush said he was planning to carry out reforms in the CIA. Yet, what remained unclear was whether such changes would take place before November's elections. He said he would seek to improve its human intelligence resources, provide it with more advanced technology and continue to improve coordination among the US' 15 intelligence bodies. Pressure is also mounting on Bush to name a new CIA director, instead of the present acting Director John McLaughlin, who served as Tenet's deputy. Another report due to be released later this week by the 11 September commission is expected to suggest naming a cabinet-level intelligence chief who would outrank the CIA director, and coordinate among the US intelligence agencies. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Gross and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage were reportedly among the top candidates for the job.
