Jane Dershovitz

I am a graudate student at American University who is studying the means the second Bush administration used to take the United States to war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq-- including whether there was a manipulation of intelligence information.

The Bush administration will today be accused of "systematically misrepresenting" intelligence regarding "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" in a comprehensive report on post-war findings.

The report, by four experts on weapons proliferation at the respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is likely to reignite calls for acommission to look into the government's pre-war intelligence claims.

The intelligence community, the report says, began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views "sometime in 2002". Repeated visits to the CIA by the US vice president, Dick Cheney, and demands by top officials of the Bush administration to see unsubstantiated reports.

The aluminum-tube allegation was perhaps the strongest, most concrete piece of evidence the White House had in its campaign to drive the American public into the proper frame of mind to go to war against a country that had never before been seen as a threat to the national security.

In a March 2 story, Murray Waas documented how Bush had been explicitly informed that the aluminum-tube allegation might not be true well before his State of the Union Address.x