OneWorld.net (U.S.)

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 19 (OneWorld) - According to terrorism and nuclear experts, the Bush administration probably tweaked some, but not all of the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq.

Raucous debates in Congress and the Senate this week have led both Democratic and Republican legislators, including Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), to push for a renewed investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee into whether the administration skewed pre-war intelligence.

The Pentagon also announced Friday, after requests by Senators Pat Roberts, a Republican, and Carl Levin, a Democrat, the launch of an investigation into the Office of Special Plans, a unit created to analyze intelligence prior to the War.

Some legislators have charged the Office with "cherry-picking" data that boosted the administration's case for war.

In response, the president has said that some legislators are trying to re-write history and Vice President Dick Cheney called Democratic critiques that intelligence was manipulated "reprehensible."

But looking back at what was known about the administration's main justifications for invading Iraq, terror and weapons experts say that a clear pattern emerges of evidence being ignored. Officials serving during George W. Bush's first term built their case largely on the idea that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, as well as a growing capability to develop not just more chemical and biological, but also nuclear weapons.

Bush officials also stressed the severity of the threat these weapons posed in the hands of Saddam Hussein, a known villain, terrorism supporter, and U.S.-antagonist.

"Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction. And he cannot be trusted. The risk is simply too great that he will use them, or provide them to a terror network," President Bush told the nation from Cincinnati in October of 2002.

Prior to the war, most weapons of mass destruction (WMD) experts agreed that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, and those stockpiles have since been found in Iraq. They also agreed that Iraq had the capability to produce more of such weapons.

"Virtually every intelligence service in the world believed that Saddam had the infrastructure to manufacture WMDs--not nuclear--but chemical and biological weapons," said Jeffrey M. Bale, a senior researcher at the non-partisan, Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

While a host of other countries were also known to have chemical or biological weapons, including Syria, North Koran, Iran, the former Yugoslavia and former Soviet Union, China, Pakistan, and India, Saddam had distinguished himself by showing a willingness to use those weapons.

"But, there was very little evidence that Saddam had a nuclear program," said Bale, an expert in the Center's Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism Research Program.

Only a "handful" of evidence suggested Iraq still had a nuclear program, and this small amount was "exaggerated," Bale told OneWorld.

There was some truth to the assertion that Iraq was tied to terrorist groups, Bale said, but claims that Iraq was specifically linked to Al-Qaeda--the group that posed the biggest threat to the United States--he called "rubbish."

"There were low-level meetings between some Iraqi intelligence officials with some people claiming to represent Al-Qaeda, but they never amounted to anything."

"Intelligence was tweaked in the sense that the people in the Bush team were convinced of certain things and basically, every bit of information that supported what they already believed they accepted, and ignored all the evidence that suggested their views were wrong."

The question of culpability--whether officials unintentionally deluded themselves about Iraq's terror links and nuclear programs, or whether they actually knew that their claims were false--is probably unanswerable.

"I think they honestly believed it," Bale said.

Imad Khadduri, an Iraqi scientist who worked on the Iraq nuclear weapons program beginning in 1981 and who left Iraq in the late 1990s, is less forgiving.

"The intelligence was definitely concocted. I was in the nuclear Iraq program for 30 years and I left in '98. It was never resurrected since '91.

"Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, and the Office of Special Plans under them--they cherry-picked only the bad information," Khadduri told OneWorld.

Prior to the war, Khadduri said he tried frantically to alert officials that Iraq's WMD programs were inactive and spoke extensively to the media, but he said no government agents ever contacted him.

"In January 2003 I predicted that 'rivers of blood will flow.' I know my people," Khadduri said.

The president and his aides have distanced themselves from the blame for faulty intelligence saying that Congress and the administration had access to the same intelligence.

“They looked at the same intelligence I did, and they voted--many of them voted to support the decision I made. It’s irresponsible to use politics," Bush said from Asia this week. But David Ensor, a CNN national security correspondent says this is inaccurate.

"The White House had access to far more than lawmakers did. Presidential daily briefs on intelligence are never given to Congress," Ensor said earlier this week.

The administration is also claiming that independent reviews have already determined it did not misrepresent intelligence before the war.

But again, Ensor disagreed, saying, "No commission or committee has yet spoken on whether the White House misrepresented pre-war intelligence. The Senate Intelligence Committee, under pressure from Democrats, is working on it. The orders to the Silberman Commission [on U.S. intelligence capabilities relating to WMD] from the White House specifically left it out."

Bush has also argued against the idea that evidence was distorted by saying that the entire world's intelligence agencies agreed with U.S. intelligence assessments on Iraq.

But critics argue that U.N. inspections teams clearly told the entire world's intelligence agencies that Iraq was not a threat.

"It was then and is now flatly untrue to say that the world was agreed that there were mass destruction weapons or programs in Iraq; the responsible U.N. agencies were not at all reaching that conclusion," said John Burroughs, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy.

In early 2003, just before the U.S. invaded Iraq, the International Atomic Energy Agency's head Mohamed ElBaradei said that there was no evidence of a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear program, and claimed that inspection teams needed just three more months to confirm the absence of a program.

Similarly, Hans Blix, head of UNMOVIC, the United Nations body responsible for chemical and biological weapons inspections, said in early 2003 that his team had not found any programs or weapons, but that more time was needed due to uncertainties about whether Iraq had fully destroyed all its prohibited materials.

"Condoleezza Rice, President Bush, Dick Cheney, all of them--starting in the summer of '02--were saying Iraq had an active weapons program that was soon going to produce a weapon.

"Meanwhile the U.N. agency was getting it right," Burroughs told OneWorld.

"People [in the U.S.] supported the war because the role of international institutions is systematically undervalued in the U.S., not only by the Bush administration but by Democrats as well--they should have been clearer than they were in the months leading up in the war that the evidence was mounting against the Bush administration's view."

"Intelligence analysis must be better shielded from political pressure," he said.