Bush pledges intelligence service reforms

US President George Bush admitted tonight that US intelligence operations needed “fundamental change” to successfully confront the threat of terrorism.

He accepted the recommendations of a scathing report about the way intelligence is collected and pledged to ensure spy agencies “pull together to work as a single, unified entity”.

A presidential commission concluded that US intelligence was “dead wrong” in almost every one of its pre-war assessments of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Its intensely critical report described the fiasco as a “major intelligence failure” and accused US spy agencies of knowing “disturbingly little” about threats posed by adversaries such as Iran and North Korea.

President Bush acknowledged that the consequence of underestimating a threat could cost tens of thousands of lives.

“We need to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on the weapons of mass murder they would use against our citizens,” he said.

“The commission points out that America needs to know much more about the weapons programmes and intentions of our most dangerous adversaries.

“We need to adjust, understand the threats and adjust our capabilities to meet those threats.” In October 2002, US agents claimed Baghdad was still pursuing a nuclear weapons programme and had both chemical and biological weapons.

President Bush used the assessment as one of his strongest justifications for invading Iraq.

But almost two years after the invasion, the hunt for Saddam Hussein’s weapons formally came to an end and the Iraq Survey Group returned to the US empty-handed.

Its report contradicted virtually all pre-war claims from both London and Washington about the existence of biological and chemical weapons.

The presidential commission called for sweeping reforms of the US intelligence community, detailing more than 70 recommendations.

Its most prominent proposal was for a stronger and more centralised management system to replace the “loose confederation of independent agencies” currently active.

Its scathing 600-page report warned that failures of such magnitude were ill-afforded and could not be repeated.

The commission largely blamed an “inability to collect good information about Iraq’s WMD programmes, serious errors in analysing what information it could gather, and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions, rather than good evidence”.

Officials also found that al-Qaida’s efforts to develop a particular, unidentified biological weapon were far more advanced than intelligence agencies had realised before the September 11 attacks.

“Al-Qaida’s biological programme was further along, particularly with regard to Agent X, than pre-war intelligence indicated,” the report said.

“The programme was extensive, well-organised, and operated for two years before September 11, but intelligence insights into the programme were limited.”

President Bush accepted that the report was a “sharp critique” of US intelligence operations and pledged to make concrete reforms.

The nine-member commission was appointed by President Bush a year ago to investigate why US spy agencies had mistakenly concluded Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.