Before Iraq war, U.S. ignored work of U.N. arms inspectors, panel says

WASHINGTON — Of all the claims U.S. intelligence made about Iraq's arsenal in the fall and winter of 2002, it was a handful of new charges that seemed the most significant: secret purchases of uranium from Africa, biological weapons being made in mobile laboratories and pilotless planes that could disperse anthrax or sarin gas above U.S. cities.

By the time President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein of the deadly weapons he was allegedly trying to build, every piece of fresh evidence had been tested — and disproved — by U.N. inspectors, according to a report commissioned by the president and released Thursday.

The work of the inspectors, who had extraordinary access during their three months in Iraq between November 2002 and March 2003, was routinely dismissed by the Bush administration and the intelligence community before the war, according to the commission led by former Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., and retired appellate court judge Laurence Silberman.

But the commission's findings, including a key judgment that U.S. intelligence knows "disturbingly little" about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, are leading to calls for greater reliance on U.N. inspectors to test intelligence where the United States has little or no access.

"U.N. inspectors are boots on the ground," said David Albright, a nuclear specialist who accompanied the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to Iraq in the mid-1990s.

Albright and others think the IAEA should be given greater access in Iran, and should be returned to North Korea. It would be up to the agency's board, which includes the United States, to authorize increased powers.

The Bush administration tussled with inspectors before the Iraq war and maintains a hostile relationship with the IAEA, whose director, Mohamed ElBaradei, the United States is trying to replace this year. The administration also wants to shut down a U.N. inspection regime led by Hans Blix that was set up to investigate biological, chemical and missile programs in Iraq.

During more than two years of investigations in Iran, the IAEA has "been critical in uncovering their secret activities so we know the scope and the status of the nuclear programs and the problems," said Albright, who has exposed unknown nuclear sites in Iran and has followed the IAEA's work there.

"There is a tremendous amount of detail that the intelligence community didn't have prior to the IAEA going in and intensifying the investigation."

The White House has not publicly presented intelligence to support its assertion that Iran has a nuclear-weapons program, as it did with Iraq. Instead, it routinely points to the IAEA investigation, Iran's large oil reserves and the secrecy that surrounded Iran's nuclear program for nearly two decades.

The IAEA has not found evidence that Iran is using its nuclear-energy program as a cover for bomb building, as the administration claims. But those findings have been dismissed by some members of the administration.

John Bolton, nominated to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has called the findings "simply impossible to believe."

Months before U.S. troops attacked Iraq in March 2003, the IAEA challenged every piece of evidence the Bush administration offered to support claims of a nuclear program there, according to the commission.

In January, IAEA inspectors discovered that documents showing Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger were forged. But the CIA chose to stick to the claim for another six months.

Two years earlier, the IAEA disputed CIA claims that Iraq was trying to buy black-market aluminum tubes for a nuclear program. The IAEA assessment, which turned out to be accurate, was first shared with U.S. intelligence in July 2001.

Blix's U.N. group tested evidence supplied by an Iraqi defector, whose tales of mobile bioweapons laboratories turned out to be fabrications, according to the report.

U.N. inspectors also determined before the war that CIA claims about a fleet of pilotless Iraqi planes were incorrect. The unmanned aerial vehicles did not have the capability to deliver chemical or biological weapons and probably were designed for reconnaissance missions.

The Bush administration has prevented the IAEA from returning to Iraq since the invasion.