Daily Update

updated 9:30 a.m. ET June 8, 2003.

British WMD dossier had 'fundamental flaws'

The Observer reports that British PM Tony Blair will " express regret" about the fundamental flaws in the second dossier his office produced on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Senior government sources told the Observer that the officials who will be called before the Intelligence and Security Committee inquiry into the weapons issue will say that the second dossier undermined public trust in government information. The officials now concede the dossier, which was largely culled from a 13-year-old thesis by a Californian PhD student, is damaging the government's case for war against Iraq.

The Independent reports that intelligence officers are holding a "smoking gun" which proves that they were subjected to a series of demands by Mr. Blair's staff in the run-up to the Iraq war. The intelligence officers apparently kept "meticulous" notes about their meeting with the Blair's staff, and are said to be furious about the comments by Leader of the Commons John Reid that there are "rogue elements" at work in the security services. The Observer says the issue of prewar intelligence about WMD in quickly becoming the story that won't go away on either side of the Atlantic, despite "frantic" efforts by leaders to make it disappear.

Meanwhile, the BBC reports that US officials have downplayed the significance of a Sept. 2002 intelligence report that casts new doubts on how much the Bush administration knew about WMD in Iraq. The Pentagon has confirmed that the report by the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) said there was no absolute proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But the head of the DIA said the report had to be seen in the context of the fact that there was no US or international presence in Iraq at the time.

The Boston Globe reports that the Department of Defense's responsibilities have grown beyond anything that military commanders had imagined at the end of the Cold War, according to national security specialists; some have voiced worry that the department's expanding roles could tax the Pentagon's resources or compromise some civilian authorities.

The fear is that giving the Pentagon greater influence will politicize the intelligence process by encouraging reports that support current policies, rather than reporting trends and developments that challenge them. ''It looked like a classic case of you can't get the intelligence you want from the intelligence community, you create your own unit,'' said Mel Goodman, a former CIA analyst who teaches at the National War College and is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. ''The civilian side of the intelligence community gets weaker and weaker, and it's obvious that [US Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld's playing a policy game to get intelligence to support policy.''

Reuters reports that intelligence historian John Prados says that the CIA bowed to pressure from the Bush administration to "hype the threat" of WMD in Iraq. "What is clear from intelligence reporting is that until about 1998 the CIA was fairly comfortable with its assessments on Iraq," John Prados wrote in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. "But from that time on the agency gradually buckled under the weight of pressure to adopt alarmist views," he said. "After mid-2001, the rush to judgment on Iraq became a stampede." The CIA denied Mr. Prados' charges.

In one very positive development in Iraq, a team of US investigators says it has found most of the archaeological treasures that many believed had been looted from the Iraqi national museum. The Washington Post reports that most of the treasures were found in a secret vault beneath the ransacked Central Bank in Baghdad. The Tigris River had flooded the bank's cellar, surrounding the vault with foul water.

updated 12:30 p.m. ET June 6, 2003.

Blix questions credibility of US-Brit WMD teams

In comments to reporters after he gave a speech to the UN Security Council, chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix questioned the credibility of the US and British teams currently looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "I do not want to question the integrity or the professionalism of the inspectors of the coalition, but anybody who functions under an army of occupation cannot have the same credibility as an independent inspector," Mr. Blix said Thursday.

Later, in interviews with the BBC, Blix also criticized the quality of the intelligence given to him by the US and Britain. "Only in three of those cases did we find anything at all, and in none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction, and that shook me a bit, I must say." Blix also said he would not be surprised if weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq, and that the coalition forces had "other reasons" for invading Iraq other than looking for those weapons. Blix also acknowledged that Iraq had not provided full cooperation, although he said he believed more could have been achieved if inspectors had stayed longer.

Meanwhile the controversy over the prewar intelligence about the presence of WMD in Iraq continued to grow in both Britain and the US. In Britain, the BBC reported that British intelligence services were asked to "rewrite" the dossier on Iraq at least six times. The Guardian reports that the new claims seems to back up previous allegations that intelligence services were told by Downing Street to "sex up" the dossier to boost support for the war. In another angle to the debate, the Financial Times reports that the claim Iraq could have its WMD ready in 45 minutes (one of the points critics claim was exaggerated), was made by a " senior officer within Iraq's military."

The New York Times reports that British PM Tony Blair continues to insist his government did not distort intelligence reports in order to exaggerate the threat of weapons of mass destruction and justify war in Iraq. Earlier this week, the Leader of the Commons,John Reid, said "rogue spies" fed false information to journalists which accused Tony Blair of exaggerating the size of Saddam Hussein's arsenal. But Mr. Reid's comments produced a combination of " amazement and skepticism" in opposition MPs, who said that intelligence sources were not taking his remarks seriously.

The Iranian news agency, IRNA, reports that the US sought to help Blair on Friday, as US assistant secretary of defense Valerie Clarke wrote a letter to the Telegraph saying "It is far too early to make any judgments as the final chapter of Saddam's WMD ambitions has yet to be written."

Reuters reports that a new secret US report made public this week may add more fuel to the WMD fire in the US. The report, written in Sept., 2002 by the Defense Intelligence Agency, said it did not have enough " reliable information" Iraq was amassing these weapons. And The Washington Post reports that analysts at the CIA " felt pressured" to make their intelligence fit the Bush administration's policy objectives. This pressure was increased, the analysts say, by the "multiple visits" paid to CIA headquarters by Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Other analysts, however, said they "welcomed" the visits.

On Thursday, President Bush said the invasion of Iraq was justified and pledged that " we will reveal the truth" of WMD to the world. Earlier in the week, Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, took the unusual step of holding a press conference to deny that senior civilian policy makers had politicized intelligence to fit their hawkish views on Iraq, and that the special intelligence unit he created in the Pentagon, known as the Special Plans unit, was there just to produce pro-war information. "This suggestion that we said to them, 'This is what we're looking for. Go find it,' is precisely the inaccuracy that we are here to rebut," Feith said.

In Congress, The Los Angeles Times reports ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee clashed over how aggressively the panel should pursue the weapons issue. The Senate's most outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, said he wants an " open, gloves-off" inquiry, specifically on the absence of proof that Iraq had WMD. He also questioned whether President Bush has been honest about the issue. "It is time that the president leveled with the American people," Sen. Byrd said.

The question of the President's veracity was also raised in different ways by two columnists. In the Boston Globe, columnist Derrick Jackson writes that with "empty hands after the battle, President Bush is losing the war for his honor," and that "Iraq is about Bush sending Americans to die for what may have been a lie." But in the Weekly Standard, Max Boot writes that it's ridiculous to think that President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair lied about the presence of WMD. "It is indeed puzzling that US forces haven't found more evidence of WMD, but this hardly shows that Bush and Blair lied. It does show how imperfect our intelligence about Iraq was, which actually makes the case for preventive war that much stronger."

USA Today says that one victim of the lack of proof of WMD might be the policy of pre-emptive strikes. The next time the president comes to Capitol Hill warning of an emerging threat, one that requires military action to pre-empt and defeat, some lawmakers of both parties say they will be skeptical.

"If you're going to have a doctrine of pre-emption," said Jay Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, "then you sure as heck better have pluperfect intelligence." A Republican senator who spoke on condition of anonymity said that if President Bush went to Congress with another plan to strike an enemy state, "It would have to be very clear and convincing intelligence for it not to cause a dispute."

Also...
• Ashcroft pushes anti-terror law expansion ( AP)
• Bush revels in cowboy speak ( BBC)
• Fallujah was not the prize brigade expected ( Army Times/LA Times)
• House cuts citizenship wait for immigrant service members ( Army Times/AP)
• Iraqis agog at Saddam family video ( MSNBC)
• Chemical Ali 'could still be alive' ( BBC)
• Saudi Arabia's leading executioner: 'I Lead a Normal Life' ( ArabNews, UK)

• Feedback appreciated. E-mail Tom Regan.