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WASHINGTON, June 11: Republicans in Congress on Wednesday rebuffed Democrats’ calls for an investigation into whether the Bush administration misread or inflated threats posed by Iraq before going to war in March.
But they agreed to hold more general hearings and review documents on US intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush administration justified the invasion largely on the imminent threat it said such weapons posed, but since the war none have been found.
Senior Republicans dismissed as political gamesmanship demands by some Democrats for a full-scale probe into whether the United States was misled into going to war.
“There seems to be a campaign afoot by some to criticize the intelligence community and the president for connecting the dots, for putting together a picture that seemed all too obvious,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, of Kansas, said at a news conference.
The Republican chairmen of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee joined with Roberts in rejecting calls for an investigation.
Concerns have mounted in Congress and worldwide over why the weapons of mass destruction that President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other countries said posed an imminent threat have not been found.
The White House has stood by its position that Iraq was pursuing banned weapons, but officials have begun to talk of finding weapons “programs” or “capabilities” instead of the weapons themselves.
‘HYPED’ INTELLIGENCE?: Some Democrats say the administration appears to have “hyped” the intelligence, drawing the most dire conclusions from the available information in a push for war to oust President Saddam Hussein.
Democrats on the two Senate committees that oversee intelligence operations called for a formal joint investigation of the administration’s case on Iraq’s weapons and alleged links to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, top Intelligence Committee Democrat, called the Republicans’ plan for regular oversight hearings “entirely inadequate and slow-paced. I’m not sure whether they really want to get to the crux of what really happened.” He said he would keep pressing for a broad inquiry.
Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, another Intelligence Committee Democrat, said Republicans were set to review documents “that have been volunteered by the intelligence agencies. That is not the way to conduct an investigation.”
But Roberts said he was seeking all relevant documents, not just what the intelligence agencies volunteered, and would proceed “in a very deliberate and bipartisan manner” starting with a closed hearing next week.
With media reports of unnamed officials saying they felt pressured to slant intelligence, Roberts said he has “yet to hear from any intelligence official expressing such concerns” and urged anyone in that position to tell the committee.
John Warner of Virginia, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the evidence he has seen so far “does not rise to give the presumption that any one in this administration has hyped or cooked or embellished such evidence to a particular purpose.”—Reuters
