WASHINGTON, June 22: The chairman of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Pat Roberts, said on Sunday that the committee has already started hearings into the reports that President George W. Bush used for justifying his invasion of Iraq.
The reports, prepared by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, said that Iraq had enough weapons of mass destruction to cause a threat to US security. Recent reports in the US media, however, have suggested that the CIA was forced to exaggerate the threat under political pressure, particularly from Pentagon.
The reports have stirred a major controversy with some members of the opposition Democratic Party demanding a public hearing into these allegations. Some opposition politicians have also accused President Bush of exaggerating intelligence reports, to make them sound more certain about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than they originally were.
Senator Roberts told Fox News that the intelligence committee had already held a hearing about these reports and that three more hearings were to follow. He added that a public hearing, a public report and a classified report would follow the four hearings.
Commenting on the allegation that President Bush had exaggerated the reports, Senator Roberts said: “I have no evidence of that. I don’t believe that is true. We’ve heard a little bit of politics, I think, from some who have questioned that, but I don’t know.”
The senate hearings are being held to determine the truth and “that’s why we have all of the voluminous material from the ceiling to the floor from the CIA. That’s our job on the Intelligence Committee,” he added.
He said that senators from both the ruling Republican Party and the Democrats were jointly approaching this issue in a very bipartisan way. “I am urging all the Intelligence Committee members to read the documents themselves.”
“At the end of it, doubtlessly, we will have a public hearing. We’ll make a public report and probably a classified report. But as of this date, I know of no interference on the part of the president or no conclusion that’s not backed up by good intelligence.”
BUSH’S SPEECH: President George W. Bush, in building his case against Iraq in a speech last October, gave a harder version of its alleged links with Al Qaeda than US intelligence did, Reuters quoted The Washington Post as reporting on Sunday.
A still-classified intelligence report, which had been reviewed by administration officials at the time of Mr Bush’s speech, included cautionary language about the possible links and warnings about the reliability of some evidence, the paper reported.
The report, known as the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, represented the consensus of the US intelligence community, according to intelligence analysts and congressional sources who read the report, the Post said.
“There has always been an internal argument within the intelligence community about the connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda,” said a senior intelligence official interviewed by the newspaper.
In his Oct 7 speech in Cincinnati, Mr Bush said Iraq posed an immediate threat to the United States, partly because of the ties he said it had to Al Qaeda, blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
He cited high-level contacts that “go back a decade” and said: “We’ve learned” that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members “in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases,” the Post reported.
The newspaper quoted its sources as saying that although the president offered essentially circumstantial evidence, his remarks included none of the caveats about the reliability of this information that were in the national intelligence document.
As the months go by without chemical or biological weapons being found in Iraq, the Mr Bush administration is facing increasing questioning over whether it exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam.
Last week Mr Bush dismissed his critics as “historical revisionists.”
In his weekly radio address on Saturday, he said one of the reasons weapons of mass destruction had not been found was that arms sites had been looted in the final days of Saddam’s rule.
“The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed,” Mr Bush said.—Reuters
