10 July 2004	Saturday	21 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425

WASHINGTON, July 9: US intelligence agencies overstated the threat of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, relied on dubious sources and ignored contrary evidence in the run-up to the invasion, a Senate committee said on Friday.

In a harshly critical report, partly blacked out for security reasons, the Senate Intelligence Committee took US spy agencies to task for numerous failures in their reporting on the alleged weapons of mass destruction, which helped President George Bush build a case for the invasion.

Senator John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said the Senate would not have voted overwhelmingly in 2002 to approve the invasion if it had known how deeply flawed the intelligence was.

"The administration at all levels, and to some extent us, used bad information to bolster its case for war. And we in Congress would not have authorized that war, we would not have authorized that war, with 75 votes, if we knew what we know now," he said. Senator Rockefeller said the invasion had left the United States less safe and would affect national security for generations.

KEY FINDINGS: Following is a summary of the key conclusions reached by the committee.

- Most of the key judgments by the US intelligence community on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were either overstated or unsupported by the underlying intelligence reporting.

- Intelligence agencies did not accurately or adequately explain uncertainties behind judgments about WMD to US policy-makers.

- The intelligence community collectively presumed that Iraq had an active and growing WMD programme. This pre-conceived idea led analysts and other operatives to interpret ambiguous evidence as if it supported the presumption, and ignore or minimize evidence to the contrary.

- There were shortcomings in almost every aspect of human intelligence gathering on Iraqi WMD. Intelligence agencies had no sources collecting information on Iraqi WMD after 1998.

- Administration officials did not attempt to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's WMD capabilities.

- The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda throughout the 1990s, but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship.

- The CIA's assessment that to date there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an Al Qaeda attack was reasonable and objective. Its assessment that Saddam, if desperate, might employ Al Qaeda to conduct terrorist attacks in the event of war was also reasonable. No information has emerged thus far to suggest that Saddam tried to employ Al Qaeda in conducting terrorist attacks. -Reuters