September 29, 2003	Monday	Sha’aban 2, 1424

WASHINGTON, Sept 28: White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday there was new US intelligence obtained before the Iraqi war about Baghdad’s weapons of mass destruction programmes, despite an assertion to the contrary by key congressional leaders.

“The president believes that he had very good intelligence going into the war,” Rice said on the “Fox News Sunday” programme.

The top aide to US President George W. Bush dismissed the finding by leaders of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee that much of the information relied upon was fragmentary or dated back to when UN inspectors left Iraq in 1998.

“There was enrichment of the intelligence from 1998 over the period leading up to the war,” Rice insisted. “And nothing pointed to a reversal of Saddam Hussein’s very active efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.”

“... It was very clear that this continued and it was a gathering danger.”

“Yes, I think I would call it new information and it was certainly enriching the case in the same direction,” she added.

Rice answered charges made by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, a Florida Republican, and Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat, in a letter to the CIA, obtained by Reuters on Saturday.

The letter, dated on Thursday, to CIA Director George Tenet said intelligence assessments that Iraq continued to pursue chemical and biological weapons and had ties to terror groups were long-standing judgments that were not routinely challenged within the intelligence agencies.—Reuters