Questions About Iraq Weapons Haunt US Election Year [View All]

[leftchick]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&ncid=578&e=2&u=/nm/20040109/ts_nm/iraq_usa_weapons_dc

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction looks set to dog the Bush administration in an election year amid persistent accusations it exaggerated evidence in making a case for war.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a liberal-leaning U.S. think tank, issued a report on Thursday that compared public and declassified intelligence information with statements made by administration officials.

It concluded that the administration made the threat from Iraq (news - web sites) sound more dire than the underlying information.
"We have found and have gone to some length to define and lay out serious misrepresentation of the facts over and above what was in the intelligence findings," Jessica Mathews, president of the think tank and one of the authors, said.

In one example, she said U.N. weapons inspectors said the amount of biological growth medium that Iraq had could produce three times as much anthrax as it had declared if it used all that growth medium to produce anthrax.