CIA under attack for weapons mindset

WASHINGTON - A Senate Intelligence Committee report tomorrow will sharply criticise the CIA for a predisposed mindset that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the war, say Senate and Government officials.

The report will say that intelligence analysts did not question the long-held belief that Iraq had supplies of banned weapons and saw ambiguous information as supporting that view, a Senate source said.

The report was also expected to criticise intelligence agencies for using unreliable and inadequate sources.

"They used the thinnest sources to justify the grandest conclusions about weapons of mass destruction and other activity in Iraq," said Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat on the panel.

The main United States justification for going to war against Iraq was the view that Baghdad posed a threat because of stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was trying to develop nuclear weapons. No large stockpiles of banned weapons have been found since the US invasion last year.

Senator Evan Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana, said flawed intelligence resulted from a pre-existing belief that Iraq had banned weapons, pressure to reach conclusions in the face of ambiguity, and that all doubts were resolved in favour of the pre-existing beliefs.

Both Republican and Democratic senators on the committee, which voted to make the report public, said it would sharply criticise the intelligence agencies.

Violence flared in central Baghdad yesterday as the interim Government unveiled sweeping security measures aimed at crushing a tenacious insurgency.

The emergency measures signed into law by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi empower the Government to impose curfews, make arrests, restrict the movement of foreigners, open mail, tap telephones and ban political groups and street protests.

As details of the measures were emerging, Allawi's Baghdad offices came under mortar fire, which wounded five people.

Two Iraqi national guards died and 21 people were wounded elsewhere in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the al-Jazeera television network aired footage of a man said to be a Filipino kidnapped in Iraq whom masked gunmen threatened to execute unless the Philippines withdrew its troops from the country within 72 hours.

In response, Filipino President Gloria Arroyo announced measures to block any more Filipinos from going to Iraq to work.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq