'CIA failed to reveal Iraq intelligence doubts'

The CIA failed to tell the White House about doubts over prewar intelligence suggesting Iraq had a nuclear weapons programme, US officials claimed today.

Analysts at the agency did not inform President George Bush about their concerns surrounding the evidence before he cited it in January’s State of the Union address as a reason for ousting Saddam Hussein.

The intelligence that indicated that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium in Niger was later shown to be false and based on crudely forged documents.

One CIA official said the information was not passed on because the Bush administration was pressuring the agency to only produce evidence that helped support its policy on Iraq.

“Information not consistent with the administration agenda was discarded and information that was (consistent) was not seriously scrutinised,” he told the Washington Post.

Doubts about the nuclear programme intelligence were raised in early 2002 following a CIA-directed mission to Niger, senior Bush administration officials told the Post.

But the agency did not reveal the results of its probe to the White House or other government agencies, they said.

The claims come amid continued controversy over allegations that the Bush administration massaged intelligence to justify attacking Iraq.

The CIA has launched a probe to determine the accuracy of its prewar evidence about Saddam’s banned weapons programme.

Some anonymous officials at the agency have claimed that Vice President Dick Cheney pressured them into only writing reports that supported the Bush administration’s policy on Iraq.

Senator Bob Graham, a Democratic Presidential hopeful and ex chairman of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, said the Niger case was “part of the agency’s standard operating procedure when it wants to advance the information that supported the administration’s position and bury that which didn’t“.

US Congress will next week start hearings into the claims that intelligence was exaggerated to help justify the war.