- NEW YORK -- The US intelligence
services withheld information from George Bush that Iraqi WMD programmes
had been abandoned, to justify their prewar contention that Saddam Hussein
possessed banned weapons, according to the New York Times.
-
- A highly critical report due to be released later this
week by the Senate select committee on intelligence is expected to lambast
the intelligence community for doing a poor job of collecting information
about Iraqi weapons programmes and for failing to pass on what information
it did have.
-
- The committee is expected to single out the outgoing
CIA director, George Tenet, and his deputy, John McLaughlin, for particular
criticism, according to the New York Times. It found no evidence that the
CIA made these mistakes because of political pressure from the White House
or the department of defence.
-
- Mr Tenet has recently been interviewed privately by the
panel, which asked him whether he had told Mr Bush that the case that Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk", as reported
in Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack. Mr Tenet reportedly refused to confirm
or deny using the phrase, saying that his conversations with the president
were privileged.
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- The report reveals that relatives of Iraqi scientists
told the CIA that Saddam had abandoned attempts to develop unconventional
weapons, but the CIA failed pass these statements on to Mr Bush, even as
he made public claims to the contrary. One CIA spokesman told the New York
Times that the families' statements were ignored because they were "not
at all convincing".
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- The committee found that one Iraqi defector, whose testimony
had been used as evidence of a biological weapons programme, had actually
said he had no knowledge of it. They did not unearth the contradiction
until they read original reports of his debriefings before the war.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1255650,00.html
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