U.S. soldiers guarding the looted Tuwaitha nuclear facility before arrival of 7-man IAEA team

WASHINGTON, June 6 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – As the administration was making the case for waging war against Iraq over its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, a Pentagon intelligence report said there was no "reliable information" Baghdad had these banned weapons, a defence official unveiled Friday, June 6.

"It is fair to say there was no reliable information to say declaratively, 'yes, there was stuff," a U.S. Defence Department official told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on condition of anonymity.

The assessment, laid out by the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in September 2002, contrasted with unqualified assertions by U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top administration officials that Iraq had amassed large stocks of chemical and biological weapons.

It is believed the report was widely circulated among the Bush administration at a time when senior officials were making the case for military action, the BBC News Online reported.

U.S. occupation forces have found no banned weapons so far in Iraq, raising questions from Congress about the intelligence given to U.S. decision-makers, and whether it was manipulated to make the administration's case for war.

The Defence official said the report was classified, but the Pentagon was considering whether to make it public.

The Senate Intelligence Committee plans to hold hearings, and the CIA is conducting an internal review of the intelligence before and after the invasion or Iraq.

Rumsfeld, who had requested the review, told reporters Thursday, June 5, after meeting with members of Congress that the intelligence was "good."

With the failure to come up with any evidence of WMD, Rumsfeld chose the easiest way out by saying Iraq might have destroyed them before the war. 

President George W. Bush’s spokesman last week said the president was satisfied with the intelligence he had received, and that it had been "borne out" since the invasion.

‘Complacency’

In a scathing attack Thursday, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia expressed amazement over the president's complacency.

"It is his truthfulness that is being questioned. It is his integrity that is on the line," said Byrd, an ardent critic of the Iraq war.

"Yet he has raised no question, expressed no curiosity, about the strange turn of events in Iraq -- expressed no anger at the possibility that he might have been misled.

"How is it that the president who was so adamant about the dangers of WMD, has expressed no concern about the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?" Byrd wondered.

The Pentagon meanwhile has revamped its search for weapons of mass destruction, setting aside for now what had turned out to be a fruitless search of some 900 suspect sites compiled by the U.S. intelligence community before the war.

Poor Intelligence

"I thought - my God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?" Blix wondered

The latest twist in the weapons row came as U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix criticized the quality of intelligence given to him by the U.S. and Britain about Iraq's alleged WMD.

He said in an interview with the BBC that his teams followed up U.S. and British leads at suspected sites across Iraq, but found nothing when they got there.

"Only in three of those cases did we find anything at all, and in none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction, and that shook me a bit, I must say.

"I thought - my God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?" Blix wondered.

On Thursday, June 5, the U.N. top inspector cast doubt on the authority of the U.S.-British experts searching for WMD in Iraq.

Addressing the U.N. Security Council, Blix said he felt "disappointed" at the way the U.S. and Britain wanted to start the invasion without letting the U.N. Monitoring and Verification Commission finish its work.

In the meanwhile, a team of seven experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arrived in Iraq to investigate post-war looting of material from the country's main nuclear facility at Tuwaitha.

But the team members are being blocked from investigating reports of contamination and sickness.

The U.S. argues that as the occupying power it is responsible for the health of the Iraqi people, according to the BBC News Online.

The number of inspectors has been limited by the Pentagon to seven, and their assessment has to be completed in two weeks, it added.

U.S defence officials insist that American troops accompany the U.N. inspectors at the site, and that the visit sets no precedent for a future IAEA role in Iraq.

Former senior U.N weapons inspector Scott Ritter earlier called on Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, another stanch supporter for the Iraq invasion, to "have the courage to be held responsible" for telling lies to the public into backing the conflict.