Senate scutinises US intelligence on Iran

WASHINGTON - The US Senate is tightening its scrutiny of intelligence reports on Iran, North Korea, China and other potential trouble spots in hopes of avoiding the intelligence lapses that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, congressional officials said on Sunday.

The Republican-led Senate intelligence committee intends to conduct what aides called "pre-emptive oversight" of intelligence on Iran, including both its nuclear programme and larger political ambitions in the Middle East.

A Senate aide said the panel would hold closed-door hearings with intelligence officials from the CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies to examine the quality of intelligence on potential "hard targets" inside Iran, especially facilities US officials believe could be used to build nuclear weapons.

Tehran denies US allegations that it is seeking nuclear arms.

US officials including Vice President Dick Cheney have stirred concern about a possible military strike against Iran. But in recent days, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have stressed the importance of diplomacy in resolving the issue.

On Sunday, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator warned that his country would not only retaliate but also speed up its nuclear programmes if the United States or Israel attacked its atomic facilities.

Meanwhile, the Senate panel would also give critical new attention to intelligence on China and North Korea, said the officials, who asked not to be identified.

Iran, North Korea and prewar Iraq were labelled as a destabilising "axis of evil" by US President George W. Bush.

US officials fear North Korea could have more than eight nuclear weapons and could sell vital bomb-making material to Islamist extremists. The Bush administration is pursuing six-party talks with Pyongyang.

China, a party to the North Korea talks, is also viewed as a potential flashpoint for US policy in Asia, and some in Washington have urged the Bush administration not to relax its focus on China while pursuing its war on terror in the Middle East.

"What looms, of course, is Taiwan and our protection of Taiwan," former CIA Director James Woolsey told the House of Representatives intelligence committee last week.

"We don't want to get into the business of only being able to fight the last war in Iraq and ignore the need we may have to face China," he said.

Intelligence reports asserting that prewar Iraq possessed large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing nuclear arms gave the Bush administration its main pretext for war against Saddam Hussein.

But no WMD have been found in Iraq and US officials have concluded that Saddam's regime had no such stockpiles.

Lawmakers, who were mainly given the US intelligence community's conclusions about Iraq, now intend to scrutinize the data and decision-making upon which intelligence judgments are based, a Senate aide said.

"We can't make the same mistakes we made before," Senator John Rockefeller of West Virginia, ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel, was quoted as saying by The New York Times on Sunday.

"One of the lessons we learned from Iraq was not to take all the information at face value and to ask more questions in the beginning rather than in the end," he added.

A Senate intelligence committee investigation into prewar intelligence on Iraq concluded that most of the key judgments were exaggerated or unsupported by underlying information.

The lawmakers also found that intelligence agencies did not accurately explain the uncertainties that attended conclusions about Iraq's prewar weapons capacity.

- REUTERS