Washington: The US intelligence agencies used unfounded "group think" assumptions to assess the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and reached conclusions that were often "over-stated" or "not supported by underlying evidence," a Senate investigation concluded today (Jul 10, 2004).

The Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, in its 'Report on Pre-War Intelligence on Iraq', said "a series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of intelligence about Iraqi weapons.

The 511-page report, the product of the committee's yearlong investigation of pre-war intelligence on Iraq, also pointed to severe management problems at the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The agency's director, George J Tenet, announced his resignation last month for personal reasons and leaves office on Sunday (Jul 11, 2004).

In accusing the CIA and its top leaders of engaging in a "group think dynamic," the committee said analysts and senior policymakers never questioned their long-held assumption that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

In addition, the committee reported, the CIA had no undercover agents in Iraq since 1998 to help gather reliable information and failed to tell policymakers of "the uncertainties of both the reliability of some key sources and of intelligence judgments".

On the key issue whether the intelligence agencies gave President George W Bush what he wanted to hear, the committee members expressed differences about whether the administration exerted undue political pressure on the intelligence community.

The Democrats lamented that a second phase of the committee's investigation into how the administration used the intelligence it received will not be completed until well after the November elections.

The committee's Republican chairman and Democratic vice-chairman agreed that the CIA and other US intelligence agencies had suffered a massive intelligence failure in assessing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes in Iraq before the March 2003 US invasion.

"The debate over many aspects of the US liberation of Iraq will likely continue for decades," said Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the committee. "But one fact is now clear before the war, the US intelligence community told the President, as well as the Congress and the public, that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and if left unchecked, would probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade. Today we know these assessments were wrong."

Moreover, he said, the report shows that "they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence."

Asked if he believed Congress would have authorised the use of force against Iraq had it known the weakness of the intelligence, Roberts said, "I do not know." He said he would have voted for the war in Iraq on humanitarian grounds, but that it would have been a different kind of war.

It would have been more similar to the US interventions in Kosovo and Bosnia in the 1990s, he said.

Senator John D "Jay" Rockefeller IV, the committee's vice-chairman, said categorically that Congress would have rejected going to war in Iraq if not for the faulty intelligence.