US: President Bush will bow to bipartisan pressure this week and set up an independent commission to investigate the massive US intelligence failure over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, US officials confirmed yesterday.
Mr Bush has been cool on an independent inquiry but a decision to hold one is likely to come within days, US officials said, though its remit may not include examining the extent of political pressure on American intelligence services to provide justification for war.
However, since the chief US weapons inspector Mr David Kay announced last week that Iraq had almost certainly no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, the pre-war statements of top administration officials are coming under increasingly critical scrutiny in the US media.
In his powerful presentation to the UN Security Council a year ago, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said for example: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tonnes of chemical weapons agents." Mr Kay told Congress last week that existing stockpiles of chemical weapons agents had been eliminated and that no new large quantities were produced.
The reaction last February of Iraq's much-derided information minister, Mohammad Saeed al-Sahaf to Mr Powell's speech - that it contained "hollow allegations that have nothing new to add to previous CIA reports" - was, it now turns out, nearer the truth.
Mr Kay, tasked by the White House to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has led the calls for an independent inquiry to discover what went wrong.
He told Fox News yesterday that until it was clear how pre-war intelligence ended up being off the mark, the public would be dubious of claims by the government that Iran, North Korea or Syria, for instance, posed grave dangers.
"If you cannot rely on good, accurate intelligence that is credible to the American people and to others abroad, you certainly cannot have a policy of pre-emption," Mr Kay said, referring to the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes.
Calls for an independent commission mounted yesterday, with Senator Trent Lott, a leading Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying, "I think it's important that we get reliable information and that we do something about it."
Another Republican member of the committee, Senator Chuck Hagel, said an inquiry was inevitable as "institutional reform within the intelligence community is going to have to be dealt with".
Vice President Dick Cheney, whose claims about banned weapons were the most adamant, consulted senators over the weekend on the terms of reference and the timing of any such inquiry.
The core of the administration's defence is likely to be that put forward by the architect of the Pentagon's Iraq policy, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, on a visit to US troops in Germany at the weekend. "You have to make decisions based on the intelligence you have, not on the intelligence you can discover later," he said.
Nevertheless US intelligence contradicting the administration's claims was left out of the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate produced to convince Congress to vote for war, according to the New York Times and the Washington Post yesterday.
The estimate, for example, claimed Iraq was trying to obtain aluminium tubes to reconstitute its nuclear weapons programme but the US Energy Department, the leading source of expertise on nuclear programmes, believed the tubes were unsuitable for such use - a view which Mr Kay now shares.
The estimate also concluded that Iraq was continuing and expanding its chemical weapons programme, despite a finding by the Defence Intelligence Agency that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons."
One of the most chilling claims made by Mr Powell to the UN on February 5th, 2003, was the Iraq had small unmanned airborne vehicles which it could use "to deliver biological agents to its neighbours or, if transported, to other countries, including the United States." Mr Kay's team established that the drones were not designed to spread deadly toxins, nor capable of such a task, but to fly unarmed reconnaissance missions.
The Washington Post reported that Vice President Dick Cheney, accompanied by CIA director George Tenet, privately briefed four top Senate and House leaders before their November 2002 vote to approve war that this was a "smoking gun" and told them in addition that Iraq had sought software with which it could map eastern US cities.
Mr Powell refused to include the claim about mapping software in his speech, which was first drafted by the CIA and then changed in Mr Cheney's office to say that Saddam Hussein's agents were trying to programme missiles to hit US cities.
Mr Powell's team established that Iraq had not sought the software, but that an Australian firm had offered it, and that it produced maps not much better than those sold at US petrol stations.
Democratic Senator Bill Nelson told Mr Kay in a committee hearing last week that he voted for the war resolution precisely because he had been told the drones posed an imminent threat.
Mr Powell's final draft, based largely on the intelligence estimate, still contained much information that Mr Kay now says was inaccurate.
The Secretary of State told the UN that the US had "first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," but nothing of the type was ever found.
Two suspect trailers located in May were not intended to be used for the production of biological weapons, but for hydrogen balloons or rocket fuel, Mr Kay said.
On May 28th, the CIA released a white paper saying the two trailers were "the strongest evidence to date" of hidden biological weapons and next day Mr Bush said, "We found the weapons of mass destruction, we found biological laboratories."
Mr Bush had told Polish TV, "You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on."