New WMD Report Slams Bush White House

Three leading non-proliferation experts from a prominent think tank charge that the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush "systematically misrepresented" the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

In a 107-page report released Thursday, Jessica Mathews, Joseph Cirincione and George Perkovich of the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) call for the creation of an independent commission to fully investigate what the U.S. intelligence community knew, or believed it knew, about the true state of Iraq's WMD program between 1991 and 2003.

They say that the probe should also determine whether intelligence analyses were tainted by foreign intelligence agencies or political pressure. Cirincione told reporters, "It is very likely that intelligence officials were pressured by senior administration officials to conform their threat assessments to pre-existing policies."

The Carnegie analysts also found "no solid evidence" of a co-operative relationship between the government of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist group, nor any evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD to al-Qaeda under any circumstances. "The notion that any government would give its principal security assets to people it could not control in order to achieve its own political aims is highly dubious," the report claims.

In addition the report, 'WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications', concludes that the United Nations inspection process, which was aborted when the agency withdrew its inspectors on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last March, "appears to have been much more successful than recognized before the war".

The report, the most comprehensive public analysis so far of the administration's WMD claims and what has been found in Iraq, is likely to reinforce widespread allegations that Bush and his top aides deliberately misled Congress and the public into going to war.

Secretary of State Colin Powell's response has been to claim that he is "confident" of the claims that he presented to the U.N. Security Council last February. Powell says that his presentation represented the views of the intelligence community. "I was representing them," he said. "It was information they had presented publicly, and they stand behind it".

Media attention on the WMD issue has cooled since last month's capture of Saddam and a visible rise in the U.S. military's confidence in fighting the bloody insurgency. But the report is being released just as two congressional committees are resuming their own probes of U.S. pre-war intelligence on WMD, which were interrupted by the long Christmas recess.

The report also comes amid new indications that the administration itself has decided that its pre-war claims about Iraq's WMD were wrong.

The New York Times reported Thursday that a 400-member military team has been quietly withdrawn from the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group (ISG) that has spent months scouring Iraq at a cost of nearly one billion dollars for evidence of WMD programs.

The withdrawal follows a previous cutback in mid-December, when ISG head David Kay had told his superiors at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) he planned to leave as early as the end of January. Kay, a former U.N. inspector who had long charged Saddam with holding vast supplies of WMD, submitted an interim report last October stating that no such weapons had been found. "I think it's pretty clear by now that they don't expect to find anything at all," said one administration official.

The Carnegie report comes on the heels of an extraordinarily lengthy article by Wednesday's Washington Post, which concluded that Iraq's WMD programs were effectively abandoned after the 1991 Gulf War. The article, which confirmed that Iraq was developing new missile technology, was based on interviews with the country's top weapons scientists and mostly unnamed U.S. and British investigators who went to Iraq after the war.