CIA to review pre-war advice

The CIA has launched a review of intelligence assessments of Iraq's banned weapons programme and its links with al-Qaida, to see how the intelligence community's pre-war pronouncements compared with reality.

The idea of a review, which emerged yesterday from interviews with unidentified officials by the New York Times, had first been raised with the CIA last October by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

However, the failure of US forces in Iraq to find hard evidence for repeated claims by US intelligence agencies that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction could make the review politically explosive, the New York Times said.

It quoted officials as saying that the review did not mean the US had given up all hope of finding Saddam's banned weapons.

Even so, closer scrutiny of the intelligence community's assessments of the threat posed by Saddam before the war could make for uncom fortable reading.

It could worsen a feud which has been running since last year, with CIA analysts complaining that ideologues from the Pentagon were exerting pressure for assessments to bolster the case for war on Iraq.

Those tensions deepened when the Pentagon set up a special cell to review intelligence on Iraq - an action seen as a rebuke to the CIA from Mr Rumsfeld for its failure to come up with the definitive link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaida.

But yesterday it appeared that the CIA had been handed the advantage. The review will reportedly be conducted by a team of retired CIA officials, and will be under the control of the director, George Tenet. They will also have the authority to study documents from outside agencies.