Bush glossed over intel differences on Iraq WMD

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W Bush glossed over differences but generally reflected US intelligence findings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in making the case for a US invasion in 2003, a congressional probe concluded Thursday.

But the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation found that separate claims by Bush and others that there was a nexus between Al-Qaeda, Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction were not backed up by intelligence.

"In the push to rally public support for the invasion of Iraq, administration officials often failed to accurately portray what was known, what was not known, and what was suspected about Iraq and the threat it represented to our national security," said Senator John Rockefeller, the Committee Chairman.

The Committee released the last two instalments of a politically contentious, long-running investigation into the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, which the invasion exposed as almost entirely wrong about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

One report examined the workings of a controversial Pentagon policy group accused of cherry-picking intelligence. The other compared public statements made in the run-up to the war by Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and other top officials, to the intelligence available at the time.