Israeli report cites faulty Iraq assessments

Erroneous Israeli warnings about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction ahead of last year’s US-led invasion were based on speculation, not fact, parliamentary investigators said today.

But it was stressed that intelligence agencies had not tried to mislead Israel’s Western allies.

A report released today said Israeli intelligence had few facts about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programme ahead of the March 2003 invasion, leading Israeli officials to take unnecessary and costly steps to protect the public.

“Why didn’t we succeed in laying down a broad and deep (intelligence) framework so we could rely on reports and not speculation and assumption? That is the central question,” said lawmaker Yuval Steinitz, who led the eight-month inquiry.

Israeli intelligence concluded that there was a high probability that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, despite little evidence backing up this assessment, the report said.

Estimates of Iraq’s weapons arsenal also increased inexplicably ahead of the war, the report found.

Still, the report stressed that the intelligence agencies did not deliberately mislead Israeli officials or try to push the United States into war.

“The committee ... did not find any signs that show an attempt to distort the intelligence picture in order to stress the necessity of going to war,” it said.

The report has delivered a blow to Israel’s vaunted intelligence agencies.

The United States and Britain cited Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction as reason for going to war.

But since ousting Saddam, the coalition’s technical experts have failed to find any such weapons, causing political problems for US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.