US: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington has charged that Bush administration officials "systematically misrepresented" the danger of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), writes Conor O'Clery in New York
In a damning indictment of President Bush's policies leading to the invasion of Iraq and toppling of President Saddam Hussein, Carnegie, while conceding that "Iraq's WMD programmes represented a long-term threat that could not be ignored," concluded that "they did not, however, pose an immediate threat to the United States, to the region, or to global security," and that UN inspections and sanctions had been working better than anyone expected or anticipated.
"It is unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of scud missiles, and facilities engaged in the ongoing production of chemical and biological weapons, that officials claimed were present, without the United States detecting some signs of this activity before, during or after the major combat period of the war," the report said.
Entitled WMD In Iraq: Evidence and Implications, the report concluded that there was "no convincing evidence" that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. The US Vice- President, Mr Dick Cheney, claimed on television in the week before the war, without qualification, that Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons".
UN weapons inspectors had discovered that nerve agents in Iraq's chemical weapons programme had lost most of their lethal capability as early as 1991, the report said, and the threat from biological weapons was related to what could be developed in the future rather than what Iraq already had.
However, Iraq was expanding its capability to build missiles with ranges that exceeded UN limits - something established by UN weapons inspectors who had begun their destruction.
One of the report's authors, Mr Joseph Cirincione, told CNN that this "first comprehensive review of everything we knew" showed that the threat assessments of the Bush administration were "deeply flawed" and the intelligence community's conclusions were "deeply politicised".
It strained credibility, Mr Cirincione said, that officials had not felt pressure to conform when the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) produced by the administration for Congress in October 2002 was "strikingly different from all previous assessments."
The report says that the NIE "went far beyond the consensus intelligence assessments of the preceding five years," and, even so, contained "40 distinct caveats or conditions usually dropped by officials" in public claims.
In the summer of 2002 "official statements of the threat shifted dramatically toward greater alarm regarding certainty of the threat and greater certainty as to the evidence." Mr Stuart Cohen, vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which produced the National Intelligence Estimate, told ABC's Nightline on Tuesday that "assertions, particularly that we had shaded our judgments to support an administration policy, were just nonsense."
Carnegie described as "questionable" and "unexamined" the claims by administration officials that Saddam Hussein would provide chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to terrorists.
It was more logical to fear that terrorists could get such weapons from poorly guarded stockpiles in Russia and other former Soviet states, such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, or from Pakistan or North Korea, where "instability, corruption and a need for cash" could allow terrorist groups to gain access to nuclear weapons or materials.
"Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programmes," it said.
They lumped nuclear, chemical and biological weapons together as a single threat, despite the "very different" danger they posed, which distorted the cost/benefit analysis of the war.
There was no evidence for claims by administration officials that "Iraq would have transferred WMD to al-Qaeda and much evidence to counter it," the report said. There was also no solid evidence of a co-operative relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, told ABC that he had sought to convey as accurate a picture as possible, given the limited information available before the war.
The intelligence reports and the knowledge that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons in the late 1980s, "led us to the conclusion, led the intelligence community to the conclusion that they still had intent, they still had capability and they were not going to give up that capability."