White House 'distorted' Iraq threat

[Old Ironhead]

Bush administration officials "systematically misrepresented" the threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to war, according to a new report to be published on Thursday by a respected Washington think-tank.


These distortions, combined with intelligence failures, exaggerated the risks posed by a country that presented no immediate threat to the US, Middle East or global security, the report says.

The study from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concludes that, though the long-term threat from Iraq could not be ignored, it was being effectively contained by a combination of UN weapons inspections, international sanctions and limited US-led military action.

It says the evidence shows that although Iraq retained ambitions to develop weapons of mass destruction, almost all of what had been built had been destroyed long before the war.

Inspectors from the US-led coalition are still seeking evidence of the programmes in Iraq. But Joseph Cirincione, director of Carnegie's non-proliferation project, said: "We think it's highly unlikely that there will be any significant finds from now on."

Carnegie is regarded as a moderately left-of-centre think-tank. It opposed the war, saying Iraq's disarmament could be achieved via inspectors, if necessary backed up by force. Mr Cirincione said the report, which took more than six months to compile, was based on hundreds of documents and dozens of interviews with specialists, former weapons inspectors and current and former US officials.

It concludes that before 2002 the US intelligence community appears to have accurately perceived Iraq's nuclear and missile programmes, but overestimated the threat from chemical and biological weapons. But it also says that during 2002, published intelligence became excessively politicised. A "dramatic shift" in intelligence assessments during the year was one sign that "the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002".

The report says administration officials misrepresented the threat in three ways.

They presented nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as a single WMD threat, lumping together the high likelihood that Iraq had chemical weapons with the possibility that it had nuclear weapons, a claim for which there was no serious evidence. The administration also insisted without evidence that Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi leader, would give WMD to terrorists.

Finally, officials misused intelligence in many ways. "These include the wholesale dropping of caveats, probabilities and expressions of uncertainty present in intelligence assessments from public statements," it says.

The Carnegie assessment concluded: "There is no evidence of any Iraqi nuclear programme", contrary to assertions by Dick Cheney, vice-president, and others in 2002. It notes that since the war the US-led coalition has found no chemical weapons or programmes and no biological weapons or agents.

The report says the White House approach to the war was based on what it called "worse case reasoning", assuming that what intelligence agencies did not know was worse than what they did know. "Worst-case planning is valid . . . [But] acting on worst-case assumptions is an entirely different matter."

The picture of an Iraqi arsenal existing only on paper is reinforced by an article in Wednesday's Washington Post, based partly on interviews with Iraqi scientists. It said that none of Iraq's weapons programmes had got past the planning stage since the 1991 Gulf war.
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[Old Ironhead]

ALSO..........
US withdraws 400 weapon hunters from Iraq

The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials.


The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.

A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. But that team is "still waiting for something to dispose of," said a survey group member.

Some of the government officials said the most important evidence from the weapons hunt might be contained in a vast collection of seized Iraqi documents being stored in a secret military warehouse in Qatar. Only a small fraction have been translated.

A report published Wednesday in The Washington Post cited a previously undisclosed document that suggested that Iraq might have destroyed its biological weapons as early as 1991. The report said investigators had otherwise found no evidence to support American beliefs that Iraq had maintained illicit weapons dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991 or that it had advanced programs to build new ones.

The report also documented a pattern of deceit that was found in every field of special weaponry. It said that according to Iraqi designers and foreign investigators, program managers exaggerated the results they could achieve, or even promised results they knew they could not accomplish — all in an effort to appease Saddam Hussein. In some cases, though, they simply did it to advance their careers, the report said, or preserve jobs or even conduct intrigues against their rivals.

Senior intelligence officials acknowledged in recent days that the weapons hunters still had not found weapons or active programs, but in interviews, they said the search must continue to ensure that no hidden Iraqi weapons surfaced in a future attack.

"We worry about what may have happened to those weapons," Stuart Cohen, the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said in an interview broadcast late Tuesday on the ABC News program "Nightline." "Theories abound as to what may have happened."

The search for Iraqi weapons remains "the primary focus" of the survey group, a senior Defense Department official said. But he acknowledged that most of the dozens of new linguists and intelligence analysts to join the team had recently been given assignments related to combating the Iraqi insurgency rather than to the weapons search.

David Kay, the head of the survey group, made it known last month that he might leave his post. Government officials said Wednesday that he had not reached a decision but that both he and his top deputy, Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency, were in Washington, in part to discuss what direction the hunt should take.

"I am sure that if they had found important evidence, we would know about it," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has said the administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat.

Bill Harlow, the top spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, said Wednesday that "the team needs to compete its work, and no one should jump to any conclusions before it has an opportunity to examine all of the circumstances."

American intelligence officials who described the seized documents said they hoped the documents might eventually help to unravel the mystery of whether Iraqi weapons remained hidden or whether they were destroyed long before what the Bush administration initially portrayed as a mission "to disarm Iraq."
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