"This could be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time," Harman

LONDON, May 30 (Islamonline.net & News Agencies) – While the British press hinted Friday, May 30 that British and U.S. claims on Iraq's WMD could be intelligence cock-up, U.S. Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld rejected Iraq WMD doubts and believed weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq.

As fears grow that the public were misled over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, senior politicians in London and Washington told the British press Friday that unprecedented intelligence blunders could be to blame, Agence-France-Presse (AFP) reported.

An unnamed senior British government minister told the Independent daily that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq would constitute "Britain's biggest ever intelligence failure" and would trigger an overhaul of the security services.

"This could conceivably be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time. I doubt it, but we have to ask," Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the U.S.'s House Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Times.

 "It was the moral justification for the war. I think the world is owed an accounting," Harman said.

"My concern is that we did not have enough good intelligence to draw the necessary conclusions that our policy makers need to be completely confident," Peter Goss, the Republican chairman of the select committee told The Times.

"Wouldn't it be nice if we gave them better information to base their judgments on?" Goss asked.

Their committee has written to George Tenet, the CIA director, asking him to respond by July 1 on several key questions, with a view to holding hearings later that month, the newspaper said, AFP reported.

A copy of the letter, which the Times reported it had seen, asks Tenet whether the intelligence was of sufficient quantity, quality and reliability, how it was analyzed, and whether "any dissenting views were properly weighed."

"The committee is interested in understanding how the CIA's analysis of Iraq's linkages to terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda was derived," the letter says, according to the same source.

The Daily Telegraph said that the issue was far graver for Blair than for U.S. President George W. Bush who presented a far wider public case for war than the British leader did in the House of Commons.

"Blair, desperate for the support of his own party, nailed himself firmly to the mast of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) and allowed his spin machine to exaggerate the danger to Britain," the newspaper said.

British government officials, quoted in the Financial Times business newspaper, said that British and U.S. military planners were depending on Saddam Hussein's regime using its weapons of mass destruction as proof that Iraq possessed them and were not expecting to mount a wide scale hunt for a hidden arsenal.

False Pretext

However, Rumsfeld has said he believes weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq and he rejected the charge that the war against Baghdad was waged under a false pretext, AFP reported Friday.

Earlier this week, Rumsfeld suggested that the Iraqis may have destroyed the weapons before the Iraq conflict. His remarks seemed to echo hints by U.S. officials behind the scenes suggesting U.S.-led forces may not find a clear-cut "smoking gun" of Iraqi weapons.

Now though, in a U.S. radio phone-in, he says he personally believes they will be found. In his latest remarks he says the reason they have not been found up until now is because the government of Saddam Hussein had worked so hard to hide them. It is not because they are not there he says - the U.S. believed they were there.

More Confusion

He also rejected the idea that the war was waged under any false pretext. In his words, the U.S. and British case against Iraq was based on what he called good intelligence.

Still, Rumsfeld's words are likely only to sow more confusion about the issue.

And while he says U.S.-led forces have been searching for only seven weeks, the questions about Iraq's weapons programs are unlikely to subside until the coalition comes up with more clear-cut evidence than it has up until now.

Bush Insists

On Thursday May 29,President George W. Bush stuck to his insistence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the US-led invasion.

"We discovered weapons manufacturing facilities that were condemned by the United Nations," Bush told reporters in a special interview prior to leaving Friday on a tour of Europe and the Middle East.

"Biological laboratories described by our secretary of state to the whole world that were not supposed to be there, that are a direct violation of the UN resolutions, have been discovered."

The United States has yet to show firm proof of banned chemical or biological weapons since the downfall of Saddam Hussein on April 9.