June 15, 2003	Sunday	Rabi-us-Sani 14, 1424

WASHINGTON, June 14: The CIA’s failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may cause major changes in the agency, including a possible retirement of its director, reports said on Saturday.

Several newspapers reported that two senior CIA officials overseeing the search for WMDs in Iraq have been reassigned.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the staffers were “exiled” because banned weapons were not found.

A Newsweek report said that the White House is blaming CIA Director George Tenet for faulty WMD intelligence and may force him out too. The report, however, warned that sacking Mr. Tenet will not repair the damage to America’s credibility abroad.

Earlier this week, the White House made the CIA director in charge of the ongoing weapons hunt in Iraq, a job that had previously belonged to the Pentagon.

The White House says that whatever information it had about Iraq’s weapons came from CIA. “You had a director of central intelligence that produced an estimate that said this regime had weapons of mass destruction,” said the US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The two reassigned CIA officials, whose names have not been revealed, were deeply involved in assembling and assessing the intelligence on Iraq’s alleged stocks of chemical and biological arms, The Los Angeles Times said.

More than two months after the fall of Baghdad, the US search teams have yet to find conclusive evidence that Iraq had such weapons, an assertion that President George W. Bush used as his primary rationale for invading Iraq, the report said.

Unless inspection teams come up with something soon that President Bush can call a smoking gun, a formal inquiry is inevitable, the Newsweek said.

“The stakes are too high to gloss over what got us to this point — either a colossal intelligence failure or the selective use and manipulation of the data that was available to suit the administration’s political aims,” the magazine said.

“These are serious charges that go to both the administration’s candor and its competence. If it is proven that President Bush misused the CIA to take the country to war, that would be worse than Watergate,” it added.

The Newsweek said that President Bush used “phony evidence in his 2003 State of the Union address as part of the administration’s case for war in Iraq.”

“The White House asserts that the CIA did not pass along the information about the forged documents, and therefore President Bush was unaware they had been falsified,” the report said.

“If true, that means that the head of the CIA, knowingly placed a verifiably false piece of information in the president’s hands that Mr Bush used as a key element in the road to war when he spoke to Congress and the country,” said the Newsweek while referring to a recent Washington Post report.

Meanwhile, other reports said that one of the two reassigned CIA officials was sent last week to the agency’s personnel department. He was heading the Iraq Task Force, a special unit set up to provide 24-hour support to military commanders during the war.

The other, a long-time analyst who had led the agency’s Iraq Issue Group, that is responsible for analysis of all US intelligence on the country, was given a less important assignment inside Iraq.

The moves come as congressional committees are reviewing prewar intelligence, and some Democrats are pushing for public hearings and a full- scale investigation.

Meanwhile, staffers on the House and Senate Intelligence committees are already poring over thousands of pages of prewar intelligence documents turned over by the CIA in recent days.

One Capitol Hill aide who has reviewed the material said there are troubling contradictions in the documents and statements.

In some cases, records show officials reaching one conclusion on Iraq’s weapons, only to offer a contradictory conclusion a few months later.

The Chronicle reported that CIA officials faced pressure from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials to declare that they had sufficient evidence to report that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.