Washington Deception

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new Senate report gives a fresh shot of adrenaline to the election-year debate over the Iraq war. President Bush and his top officials deliberately misrepresented secret intelligence to make the case to invade Iraq, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The panel put a new spin on old charges, comparing claims made in five speeches by top Bush administration officials with intelligence reports. The committee says officials wrongly linked Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks and al-Qaeda; claimed Iraq would give terrorist groups chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, and said Iraq was developing drone aircraft to spread chemical or biological agents over the United States. None was borne out by intelligence.

The report released Thursday follows, by years, an earlier committee effort that assessed the quality of pre-war intelligence on Iraq and found it severely lacking. This report is known as "phase II" and spawned a nasty partisan fight in the committee. It plows well-tread political ground by contrasting what Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said between October 2002 and March 2003, when the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began, with intelligence reports that since have been released. According to the committee's chairman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va, the problem was the Bush administration concealed information that would have undermined the case for war. "We might have avoided this catastrophe," he said. Bush's press secretary, Dana Perino, said the problem was flawed intelligence heading into the war. "We had the intelligence that we had, fully vetted, but it was wrong. And we certainly regret that," she said.