US admits flaws in intelligence on Iraq

President George W. Bush's national security adviser has acknowledged there may have been flaws in pre-war intelligence about Iraq but brushed aside calls for an independent investigation into the matter.

"I think what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground," Condoleezza Rice told CBS.

"That's not surprising in a country that was as closed and secretive as Iraq, a country that was doing everything it could to deceive the United Nations, to deceive the world."

Bush based his decision to invade Iraq last year on what he called a "grave and gathering danger" posed by Iraq's weapons.

He acted without United Nations backing, cutting short efforts by UN inspectors to check out the weapons reports in Iraq.

In a series of television interviews, Rice defended Bush's decision and said the United States may never learn the whole truth about Iraq's arms capabilities because of looting, which US forces failed to stop immediately after the invasion.

For months Administration officials had expressed confidence banned weapons would be found.

But after the top US weapons hunter concluded Iraq had no stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons, the White House said on Monday it would review pre-war intelligence.

On Tuesday, Bush tempered his pre-war insistence that Iraq had an arsenal of banned weapons.

The weapons issue, which has the potential to undermine public trust in the President, is a hot topic in campaigning for the November presidential election, with Democrats saying Bush misled the country over the level of the Iraqi threat.

Bush's main international ally over Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has come under similar pressure from political opponents but this week Blair drew comfort from the Hutton inquiry report rejecting a BBC claim that he had hyped the threat from Baghdad.

The White House said Rice was not breaking any new ground yesterday.

"As we've always said, intelligence is never perfect," said one Administration official.

The White House acknowledged last year that it had been a mistake to accuse Iraq of trying to buy African uranium. The allegation - included in Bush's State of the Union address - was found to have been based partly on forged documents.

Rice said the US team hunting for Iraq's weapons would "gather all of the facts that we possibly can", leaving open the possibility that its findings may be inconclusive.

She blamed gaps in data on looters who sacked government offices after the invasion and on ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who she said was so secretive that "he allowed the world to continue to wonder" what weapons he still had.

Critics say the Administration did little to secure sensitive sites immediately after the invasion, undercutting efforts to find the evidence of weapons.

David Kay, who had led the US team hunting for Iraq's weapons, warned this week of an "unresolved ambiguity" about Saddam's weapons capabilities, partly because of the looting of documents, laboratories and military bases.

Kay said he would support an independent investigation into the intelligence used by the White House to justify going to war after concluding it was highly unlikely Iraq had large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

The White House said it did not want any such investigation until the Iraq Survey Group, which is continuing to search for weapons in Iraq, had completed its work.

Rice told NBC that the intelligence community had already launched its own investigation - "a kind of audit of what was known going in and what was found when they got there".

A CIA official said that investigation, headed by Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director, was still under way.

Rice said the Administration would not change its position that Saddam had to go.

"The judgment is going to be the same: This is a dangerous man in a dangerous part of the world and it was time to do something about this threat."

The recurring theme at present on both sides of the Atlantic is the failure of the intelligence services.

Hutton's report absolved Blair and his coterie from implanting material in last September's Iraq dossier but even he pointed out that the notorious 45-minute claim was based on intelligence yet to be proved right.

In front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay, reputed to be a "super-hawk", and seen by the Bush and Blair Administrations as the great hope of finding something to justify the weapons of mass destruction claim, said: "It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment."

He resisted the view that the intelligence community was pressurised by the political establishment to produce information to fit a case for war. He pointed out that the intelligence services of France and Germany also reported that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Democrats were not convinced. Senator Edward Kennedy said: "Many of us feel that the evidence so far leads only to one conclusion, that what has happened was more than a failure of intelligence: it was the result of manipulation of the intelligence to justify the decision to go to war."

In Britain John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), tasked with drawing up the September dossier, has been criticised by former and current members of the intelligence community for being seduced by proximity to Downing St. He acquiesced to demands for "strengthening" of the language in the dossier from Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's communications director, and Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff.

Hutton failed to find anything wrong with Scarlett's actions.

- REUTERS, INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq