Democrats urge inquiry into 'misleading' Iraq war intelligence

AMID new questions about US President George W Bush's determination to remove Saddam Hussein as Iraq's president, several US Democrats have called for an official inquiry to determine whether he intentionally misled Congress.

At a forum where the word "impeachment" loomed large, Exhibit A was the so-called Downing Street memo leaked to The Sunday Times.

Recounting a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's national security team, the memo says the Bush administration believed war was inevitable and was determined to use intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the ousting of Saddam.

"The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," one of the participants was quoted as saying at the meeting, which took place just after British officials returned from Washington.

Mr Bush "may have deliberately deceived the United States to get us into a war," Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York said. "Was the president of the US a fool or a knave?"

The Democratic congressmen were relegated to a tiny room in the bottom of the Capitol for their meeting yesterday, and the Republicans who run the House scheduled 11 major votes to coincide with it.

"We have not been told the truth," Cindy Sheen, whose soldier son was killed in Baghdad, told the Democrats. "If this administration doesn't have anything to hide, they should be down here testifying."

The White House refuses to respond to a letter dated May 5 from 122 congressional Democrats about whether there was a co-ordinated effort to "fix" the intelligence around the policy, as the Downing Street memo said.

A White House spokesperson said that Democrat John Conyers, who organised the meeting, "is simply trying to rehash old debates."

Mr Conyers and a half-dozen other members of Congress were stopped at the White House gate last night when they hand-delivered petitions signed by 560,000 Americans who want Mr Bush to provide a detailed response to the Downing Street memo.

Eventually, White House aides retrieved the petitions at the gate and took them into the West Wing.

"Quite frankly, evidence that appears to be building up points to whether or not the president has deliberately misled Congress to make the most important decision a president has to make, going to war," Charles Rangel, senior Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said.

Mr Conyers pointed to statements by Mr Bush in the run-up to invasion that war would be a last resort. "The veracity of those statements has, to put it mildly, come into question," he said.

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson said: "We are having this discussion today because we failed to have it three years ago when we went to war. It used to be said that democracies were difficult to mobilise for war precisely because of the debate required," Mr Wilson said, adding that the lack of debate in this case allowed the war to happen.