US: The Bush administration hyped sketchy intelligence to make the case for war against Iraq, according to new claims calling into question the credibility of pre-war statements made by President George Bush and his senior officials, reports Conor O'Clery, North America Editor.
The reports indicate that the Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, came under sustained pressure from the White House and the Defence Department to include dubious intelligence in his February 4th speech to the United Nations on Iraq.
At one point during rehearsals at CIA headquarters in Washington for that speech, Mr Powell threw several pages into the air and declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to today's US News and World Report.
The most overblown conclusions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction came from a "mini-CIA" set up in the Pentagon by the Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, according to an army intelligence officer who told Time magazine: "Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically, distorting the intelligence." Last week Mr Rumsfeld denied that war was "waged under any false pretence".
Possession of banned weapons was the main reason given by the Bush administration for attacking Iraq, and the growing scepticism expressed in the mainstream US media could have far-reaching consequences for White House credibility.
A classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons by the Defence Intelligence Agency in September 2002, obtained by US News, stated: "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons . . ."
However, on September 19th Mr Rumsfeld testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that Saddam Hussein's "regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas."
The Republican chairman of the committee, Senator John Warner, was taken to task yesterday on CNN by a military officer phoning in to express anger about being sent to fight on the basis of questionable intelligence.
Senator Warner replied: "Like you, my credibility is on the line. I relied on that intelligence. We're going to conduct a very thorough review and investigation, and this is one senator who will hold people accountable." The CIA is already conducting a review of its prewar intelligence, at the request of the House Intelligence Committee.
Mr Rumsfeld claimed to Senator Warner's committee that Saddam Hussein "has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons, including anthrax and botulism toxin, and possibly smallpox". No trace of any of these materials has been found to date in the search by US forces of 300 suspected Iraqi sites.
In his testimony to the Senate committee, whose backing for the war was crucial to the White House, Mr Rumsfeld also said that the Iraqi regime "has an active programme to acquire and develop nuclear weapons" with designs for two nuclear devices with a team of scientists, technicians and engineers in place.
"Very likely all they need to complete a weapon is fissile material and they are, at this moment, seeking that material," he said.
Three months later, on December 19th, the State Department issued a list of the charges against Iraq which included its failure to tell the UN "about its efforts to buy uranium from Niger." In his State of the Union speech six weeks later President Bush said Saddam had sought to buy uranium from an African country, without naming Niger.
The charge relied on British-supplied documents since proven to be forged, and inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have since discounted the presence of any ongoing nuclear programme in Iraq.
The first draft of Mr Powell's February speech, designed to convince a hostile UN of the need for war, was prepared by Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief-of-staff, Mr Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and provoked passionate debate for six days inside the administration, US News claims, based on interviews with a dozen officials.
The 45-page script included information that Iraq had ordered computer software from Australia that would allow it to plan an attack on the US, an allegation not supported by the CIA. It was dropped.
Mr Powell also refused to say, despite the insistence of the National Security Adviser. Ms Condoleezza Rice, that the suspected leader of the 9/11 attacks, Mohammed Atta, had met an Iraqi ntelligence officer in Prague, something US and European intelligence agencies could not confirm.
Mr Powell was forced to appoint his own review team to go over the intelligence with the Director of the CIA, Mr George Tenet, as Mr Cheney's office pressed for the harshest assessment of Iraq's regime which one senior official said contained "unsubstantiated assertions, in my view".
Mr Rumsfeld's policy adviser, Mr Douglas Feith, told US News it was inevitable that the "least developed" intelligence would be dropped from Powell's speech, and Mr Tenet said: "Our role is to call it like we see it, to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and what we base it on."
In his speech to the UN Security Council Mr Powell repeated the bulk of Mr Rumsfeld's September charges about Iraq's large stocks of chemical and biological weapons and said: "We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction. He's determined to make more."
Mr Powell played down the idea that Saddam had a viable nuclear weapons programme, saying only that he believed Iraq "had attempted" to reconstitute its nuclear programme. He cited the purchase of aluminum tubes and magnets, evidence also challenged by IAEA inspectors.
Despite that, Mr Cheney told NBC's Meet the Press on March 16th, at a time when anti-war protests were growing in the US: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
Last week the CIA stated that two trailer trucks with equipment to make biological agents found in northern Iraq were evidence of a programme to make biological weapons, although no traces of any agents were found.
Mr Bush claimed the empty trucks constituted sufficient proof of Washington's pre-war assertions of "massive stockpiles" of biological weapons.
In an interview with Polish television on Thursday, he said: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and 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. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them."
However, as far back as April 24th, just days after the end of the war, Mr Bush raised the possibility that the weapons might no longer exist. "We know he had them," the President said. "And whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we're going to find out the truth."