WASHINGTON, April 1, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - The United States was “dead wrong” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its officials made the case for invading the oil-rich country despite intelligence doubts and strong voices of dissent, a US presidential report revealed.

However, US newspapers said Friday, April 1, the report stopped short of pointing fingers at who is to blame for the WMD failure, which led to the invasion-turned- occupation of Iraq and stoked fears the offensive was based on false pretexts.

The United States “knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors,” the report warned.

As former secretary of state Colin L. Powell worked into the night in a New York hotel room, on the eve of his February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council, CIA officers sent urgent e-mails and cables describing grave doubts about a key charge he was going to make.

On the telephone that night, a senior intelligence officer warned then-CIA Director George J. Tenet that he lacked confidence in the principal source of the assertion that ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s scientists were developing deadly agents in mobile laboratories.

“Mr. Tenet replied with words to the effect of ‘yeah, yeah’ and that he was ‘exhausted,’” read the report of President Bush's commission on the intelligence failures leading up to his decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

Tenet told the commission he did not recall that part of the conversation, and that he relayed no such concerns to Powell, who made the germ-warfare charge a centerpiece of his presentation the next day, according to the report, carried by the Washington Post.

Up until the days before US troops entered Iraqi territory that March, the intelligence community was inundated with evidence that undermined virtually all charges it had made against Iraq, according to the report.

The commission blamed leading analysts for accepting at face value data supporting the existence of illegal weapons and discounting counter-evidence as skillful Iraqi deception.

It also slammed the CIA for making swift conclusions on Iraq’s weapons program since 2001, saying the CIA got its first report that Iraq was trying to buy black-market aluminum tubes after Bush took office in 2001.

After intercepting a sample in April of that year, the agency quickly concluded that Iraq intended the tubes to be used in centrifuges that would enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear weapon, according to the Commission.

It also said the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) never budged from that analysis.

In the following 18 months, WINPAC analysts won a fierce bureaucratic battle against dissenters from other agencies who said the tubes -- roughly three feet long and three inches in diameter -- were the wrong size, shape and material for plausible use in centrifuges.

Further, the tubes turned to be the principal evidence for a “key judgment” in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which said Iraq had “reconstituted” a nuclear weapons program and could build a bomb before the end of the decade.

Seeking to support its assertions about the aluminum tubes, the CIA made a series of arguments that the nation’s leading centrifuge physicists described repeatedly as technically garbled, improbable or unambiguously false, according to the report.

The report said one WINPAC analyst -- identified previously in The Washington Post as “Joe,” -- responded by bypassing the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the nation’s only major center of expertise on nuclear centrifuge technology.

The report said the CIA also created a panel of experts to rival the Oak Ridge team. Those experts concluded, based on “a stack of documents provided by the CIA,” that the tubes were meant for centrifuges.

The presidential commission said in the bluntly worded report the underlying causes of the failure to have understood Iraq’s weapons programs “are still all too common.”

It flatly stated that harm done to American credibility because of the Iraq failure would take “years to undo,” calling on intelligence officials to encourage a culture that challenges assumptions before they turn into accepted wisdom, as they did about Iraq in the prelude to the American-led invasion.

The breadth and detail of the indictment, written in vivid, colloquial language rare in Washington, went beyond previous critiques, according to the New York Times Friday.

The report was particularly blistering about the low quality of the “President's Daily Brief,” the morning intelligence review that once was deemed the gold standard of American intelligence.

Bush had resisted turning over such briefing documents to the 9/11 commission that reported its findings last year. He did provide them to this panel, which operated under a far greater cloak of secrecy.

Without revealing details of the briefs on Iraq, this commission concluded that the briefs were even “more alarmist and less nuanced” than the far more detailed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons.

The panel concluded that the intelligence estimate, intended to be the government’s most authoritative analysis of the Iraqi threat, was “dead wrong.”

Bush met with the full commission for more than an hour Thursday morning, and emerged to declare that “we will correct what needs to be fixed, and build on what the commission calls solid intelligence successes.”

Though much of the report concentrates on how the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other corners of the intelligence world exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq before the US-led invasion, Bush took a very different view of its main message. He put his emphasis on the opposite problem.

He underlined the hazard of missing or underestimating threats “in a dangerous new century.”

Analysts and observers said Bush seems to refer to Iran, another oil-rich country neighboring Iraq and which has come under fierce pressures for seeking to have weapons of mass destruction.