Barbara Ferguson, Arab News Correspondent

WASHINGTON, 29 September 2003 — Leaders of the US House Intelligence Committee, who spent four months examining 19 volumes of classified material used by the Bush administration as its case for war on Iraq, have found “significant deficiencies” in the US intelligence community’s ability to collect updated information on Iraq.

“The absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programs had been destroyed was considered proof that they continued to exist,” committee chairman Rep. Porter J. Goss, R-Florida, a former CIA officer and longtime supporter of intelligence agencies, said in a letter sent to CIA Director George Tenet last Thursday. The letter was leaked to the press this weekend.

The House committee’s leaders said the buildup to the war in Iraq betrayed the CIA’s and other agencies’ inability to employ technologies to detect weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or to gather credible intelligence from credible informants in Iraq. “We believe there were significant deficiencies with respect to the IC’s (intelligence community’s) intelligence collection activities concerning Iraq’s WMD programs and ties to Al-Qaeda prior to the commencement of hostilities there,” the letter said.

“Iraq was an intractable and difficult subject. The tradecraft of intelligence rarely has the luxury of having black and white facts,” CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said in a statement in response to the letter.

CIA adviser David Kay, who is coordinating the hunt for Iraq’s banned weapons, is scheduled to present lawmakers with an interim progress report in the coming week. He is expected to announce that no weapons have been located.

“The comments by the House Intelligence Community are not shocking to anyone who has paid attention to the way the Bush administration manipulated the case for war against Iraq,” Robert Jensen, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas, told Arab News yesterday.

“The Bush Administration lied and distorted facts to induce fear in the US public to justify a war,” said Jensen.

Jensen insists the Bush administration’s intentions in Iraq “had nothing to do with the liberation or reconstruction of Iraq. They spent little time planning for the occupation, which the administration themselves admit, and do not have the kind of funds necessary to reconstruct Iraq — which is the legal obligation of an occupying power. It’s all about oil and empire.” US policy since the end of World War II, “was to control the flow of oil and oil profits, not through direct occupation, but by the construction of a regional system in which various governments were set up to be dependent on the US,” said Jensen. “The result is a disaster.”