Leaders of the US House intelligence committee have criticized the US intelligence community for relying largely outdated, "circumstantial" and "fragmentary" information to conclude that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida, the Washington Post reported Sunday.
Top members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence spent four months on 19 volumes of classified material used by the Bush administration to make its case for the war on Iraq and found "significant deficiencies" in the community's ability to collect fresh intelligence on Iraq.
The Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Porter Goss, and its ranking Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman, said the US intelligence had used "past assessments" dating to 1998 when UN inspectors left Iraq and "some new 'piecemeal' intelligence."
"The absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programs had been destroyed was considered proof that they continued to exist," the two committee members said in a letter on Thursday to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George J. Tenet.
The letter said the buildup to the war in Iraq amounted to "a case study" of the CIA's and other agencies' inability to gather credible intelligence from informants in Iraq or to employ technologies to detect weapons programs.
The letter constitutes a significant criticism of the US intelligence community.
For months, critics of US President George W. Bush have questioned his rationale for waging war against Iraq and the administration's persistent claims that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had a cache of illegal weapons that posed a threat to the United States.
The administration is expecting a progress report soon from David Kay, the CIA's chief weapons hunter in Iraq, but CIA and White House officials have said it is not expected to settle questions on Saddam's alleged weapons programs.
The CIA, through spokesman Bill Harlow, disputed the conclusions and accused the panel of not conducting "a detailed inquiry on this study."
(Xinhua News Agency September 29, 2003)
