11 July 2004	Sunday	22 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425

WASHINGTON: The Senate's scathing report about how the Central Intelligence Agency bungled its pre-war assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities is yet another blow to the agency that has frequently found itself under fire in recent years.

The report, issued two days before CIA Director George Tenet officially steps down from his post, outlined a series of bureaucratic mismanagement and unsound practices at the CIA for gathering and analyzing the intelligence that formed the Bush administration's public and diplomatic arguments for going to war.

The CIA has been grilled ever since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks was again mired in controversy over the testimony of the chief US official searching for the alleged stockpiles, David Kay, in January. Kay told senators "we were almost all wrong" in believing Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

As it became increasingly clear the United States would not uncover the banned weapons, administration officials, including President George W. Bush, conceded there were problems with the intelligence, and Friday's report detailed what most already seemed to know: The information the United States used to justify the invasion was deeply flawed.

"What the president and the Congress used to send the country to war was information that was provided by the intelligence community and that information was flawed," said Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, which wrote the report.

But while the report addresses the problems at the CIA, Democrats on the committee were frustrated the inquiry failed to examine the role the White House might have played in exaggerating or manipulating the intelligence to bolster the case for going to war.

"After the analysts in the intelligence community produced an intelligence product, how is it then shaped or used - or misused - by the policy-makers?" Asked John Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

The committee will focus on that issue in the second phase of the report, which is not expected to be released until after November's presidential elections.

Bush, on the campaign trail Friday, stood by his decision to invade Iraq despite the report, while keeping the pressure on the CIA to ensure the errors are not repeated and proper reforms are enacted.

"He had the ability to make weapons. He had the intent and the capability, which is why I say I would have done it again, because he's a dangerous person," Bush said.

It remains unclear how damaging the political fallout over the report will be to Bush, but Democrats are sure to continue raising questions about how the intelligence was used; whether the White House pressured the CIA to draw conclusions that would support a decision to launch a war.

Roberts said the inquiry produced no evidence political pressure was brought to bear on the agency, but his colleague, Rockefeller, disagreed, saying he believed the intelligence community felt the need to reach a predetermined conclusion.

At the CIA the fallout was palpable. John McLaughlin, the deputy director set to takeover for Tenet held a rare news conference to ensure the public the measures were being taken to improve the agency's methods and not make similar mistakes in the future.

At the same time, he defended the agency, saying the flaws should not be exaggerated and the problems should not reflect on the CIA as a whole.

"It is wrong to exaggerate the flaws or leap to the judgment that our challenges with pre-war Iraq weapons intelligence are evidence of sweeping problems across the broad spectrum of issues with which the intelligence community must deal," he said.

The 500-page report focused on the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that was the cornerstone of the Bush administration's case. The report said "most of the major key judgments" in the conclusions were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting".-dpa