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Intelligence inputs justified war: Rice

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON JUNE 9. The Bush administration is stressing that since Iraq had so well concealed its weapons of mass destruction over the years, it is going to take time to find them. And a top official has rejected allegations that the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, applied political pressure on intelligence analysts to exaggerate the findings of Iraqi threat. "I'm sure more evidence and proof will come forward as we go down this road,'' the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said on a Sunday talk show.

The senior administration official also stressed that his statement to the United Nations prior to the Iraqi war had been vetted for days by the intelligence community. "We spent four days and nights at the CIA making sure that whatever I said was supported by our intelligence holdings," Gen. Powell said.

In February, Gen. Powell made a presentation to the U.N. where he argued that there was no doubt that the Saddam Hussein government had the capability to produce and the intention to use weapons of mass destruction. Gen. Powell's presentation came with some electronic intercepts. What has dismayed the administration and members of Congress is that for all the intelligence briefs prior to the war, eight weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the U.S. is yet to unearth any major centres for the production of banned weapons or storage facilities.

Search teams have found two mobile laboratories equipped with fermenters, the closest thing to finding a biological weapons programme. But no biological weapons have been found and critics are saying that this finding falls far too short. What has come to bother many is that this Republican administration is now asking for "more time" when this was exactly the same that the weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix and Mohammad ElBaradei were pleading for between January and March and were basically laughed out of court. The President's National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, maintained on Sunday that the justification for the war against Iraq came from many sources that included information from the CIA, intelligence reports from abroad, information from the U.N. weapons inspectors and the Saddam Hussein regime's efforts to conceal what was going on.

More importantly, the top official rejected allegations that the Vice-President, in his visits to the CIA headquarters, had sought to pressure intelligence analysts to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. Meanwhile, at least one Democrat in the fray for the presidential elections of 2004 has said that he believed that weapons of mass destruction would be found. But Richard Gephardt added that if the President, the U.N. and the international leaders were "all duped, or if they didn't have the right information, then this is the most colossal hype that ever was."

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