June 3, 2003	Tuesday	Rabi-us-Sani 2, 1424

WASHINGTON, June 2: Leading members of the US Congress are planning an investigation into whether officials in Washington exaggerated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion.

Senator John Warner said that the senate’s Intelligence and Armed Services committees will soon hold joint hearings into whether an intelligence breakdown occurred in the run-up to the Iraq invasion or whether US officials oversold intelligence data to whip up domestic support for the conflict.

Mr Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on CNN that he had obtained assurances last week from Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet that the agency would fully cooperate with the probe.

“He assured me that he’s going to supply the Congress first and foremost with all the statements made by the administration on weapons of mass destruction and the underlying intelligence that supported those statements,” said the senator, interviewed on Sunday.

The Republican senator from Virginia said he was sure that weapons would ultimately be found.

In Baghdad, the US civil administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, agreed.

“I think we will find something at some point,” Mr Bremer told reporters. “It seems very hard to believe that (Iraqi president) Saddam Hussein would have put his people through the misery he put them through for 12 years ... if he didn’t have something to hide.”

Florida Senator Bob Graham said that US credibility and prestige — which already took a beating in the weeks leading up to the attack — is at stake in locating Iraq’s alleged weapons labs.

“If (weapons) are not found, and that will indicate a very serious intelligence failure, or the attempt to keep the American people in the dark by manipulating that intelligence information,” said Mr Graham, also speaking on CNN.

The continued inability to find weapons of mass destruction “is going to undercut the confidence of the American people and raise serious doubts with the international community as to the basic truthfulness of the United States”, Senator Graham said.

Before the weeklong holiday break, West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd also lent his voice to a chorus of doubt on the accuracy and forthrightness of how the Bush administration used its intelligence agencies.

“It appears to this senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing International law, under false premises,” Byrd said in a florid speech delivered from the Senate floor.

“The run-up to our invasion of Iraq featured the president and members of his cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ laden death in our major cities,” said Byrd, the longest-serving member of the Senate.

“The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination of post traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the attacks of Sept 11 (2001),” Mr Byrd said.

“It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo for the anger.” —AFP