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Attention turns to prewar Iraq intel
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- As a congressional committee held closed-door hearings on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction program, the Bush's administration remained steadfast Wednesday that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed banned weapons before the war. President Bush also offered a strong defense of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and fended off accusations of exaggerating the threat from Saddam to justify war with Iraq. "I'll say something right now: He [Blair] operated on very sound intelligence, and those accusations are simply not true," Bush told reporters during a meeting on Medicare with senators at the White House. Blair joined Bush in going to war with Iraq in the face of massive opposition in his country and much of Europe. Bush and his top aides cited the need to destroy Saddam's weapons programs as the central reason for going to war. With mounting criticism, Bush has criticized skeptics twice this week as "revisionist" historians who he said overlook the fact Saddam is no longer a threat to the United States and the world. Blair now faces multiple inquiries in Parliament, including some from his own Labour Party, about whether claims about weapons in Iraq were exaggerated. Bush also faces questions from members of Congress and some former intelligence officials about the quality and veracity of the intelligence on Iraq. The House Intelligence Committee held closed-door hearings Wednesday on how the authors of last October's classified National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iraq's WMD program was flourishing. The hearing is the first in what could be several hearings in both the House and Senate in the months ahead to examine those questions. Rep. Jane Harman of California, the committee's ranking Democrat, issued a statement saying in part, "The NIE is a logical starting point to this investigation. It helped frame the decision to go to war." A Democrat leaving the hearing said intelligence analysts defended their work and blamed the inability to find weapons so far on the fact that Iraq is a big country and that the weapons are easily concealed or destroyed. The lawmaker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had doubts. "No one ever said their weapons of mass destruction would be hard to find [before the war]," he said.
A Republican official defended the analysts' findings. "In intelligence, you can't produce proof that is incontrovertible" the Republican said. "You try to get smart people to look at the information and come up with their best assessment." The House committee will hold its second hearing Thursday. Witnesses will include Washington-based officials overseeing the ongoing hunt for the alleged Iraqi weapons. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will hold a closed-door hearing Thursday as well. At a Pentagon news briefing Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the U.S. and British intelligence. He said the information was "imperfect, but good." "I think the intelligence was correct in general, and that you always will find out precisely what it was once you get on the ground and have a chance to talk to people and explore it. And I think that will happen," he said. Saddam's regime became expert at hiding banned weapons even amid "an inspections environment in that country," Rumsfeld said. "They had a very long period to hide or do whatever it is they wanted to do with those capabilities." Jay Garner, former director of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance in Iraq, noted the recent finds of two trucks that the United States said were made for biological weapons. Such equipment "indicates to me that [Saddam] had that and probably intended to use it if he had been able to," Garner said at the news conference with Rumsfeld. "He had 12 years to hide it. He was very skillful at doing that," Garner said. Appearing before the House Armed Services Committee, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz promised the United States "will get to the bottom of it." Noting that Baghdad is the size of Los Angeles, California, Wolfowitz said a weapon such as anthrax "could be hidden in a room a fraction the size of this one." "You're not going to find it in a house-to-house search. You're going to find it when people start to talk to you, and we're in the process of finding the people who can talk," Wolfowitz said. White House Correspondent Dana Bash and Capitol Hill Producer Ted Barrett contributed to this report.
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