US intelligence ‘dead wrong’ on WMD in Iraq

US INTELLIGENCE on Iraq was “dead wrong”, dealing a blow to American credibility that will take years to undo, a presidential commission reported yesterday.

It also concluded that spymasters still know disturbingly little about nuclear programmes in countries like Iran and North Korea.

The commission’s bluntly written report, based on more than a year of investigations, offered a damning assessment of the intelligence that President George W Bush used to launch the Iraq war two years ago and warned that flaws are still all too common throughout spy agencies.

“We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” the commissioners wrote.

And at a time when the United States is accusing Iran of nuclear ambitions and pressuring North Korea on its nuclear programmes, the report said: “Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programmes of many of the world’s most dangerous actors.”

The presidential commission, led by appeals court judge Laurence Silberman and former Virginia Democratic senator Charles Robb, called for a broad overhaul in the spy community to increase information-sharing and foster dissenting views.

“The flaws we found in the intelligence community’s Iraq performance are still all too common,” they wrote.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the president agreed the intelligence community needs fundamental change.

He said the commission’s recommendations would be reviewed and acted on “in a fairly quick period of time.”

A key chapter in the report - on US intelligence on alleged nuclear weapons programmes in Iran and North Korea - was classified and not made public. But sources familiar with that section said it was among the most critical, finding US intelligence on Iran’s nuclear programme in particular to be inadequate.

The White House has acknowledged intelligence shortcomings - national security adviser Stephen Hadley called data on Iran “hard to come by” - but the administration has made clear it stands by its policy of preemption.

The 600-page report, in what amounted to a direct assault on George Tenet, who was CIA director in the run-up to the war, found “the daily reports sent to the president and senior policymakers discussing Iraq over many months proved to be disastrously one-sided”.

Mr Bush and US Vice-President Dick Cheney escaped direct blame.