US exaggerated Iraqi weapons threat: report By North America correspondent Leigh Sales
US Secretary of State Colin Powell has defended the case made by the Bush Administration for war in Iraq after the publication of a damning new report.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a non-partisan think tank, has examined a range of evidence and says it is clear Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction (WMD) after the mid-1990s, nor did it pose an immediate threat to international security.
Mr Powell says he stands by the speech he gave to the United Nations last year, laying out America's case against Iraq.
"It said that there was that capability within Iraq and they were doing these kinds of things, and they [Carnegie] believe that we perhaps overstated it, but they [Carnegie] did not say it wasn't there," Mr Powell said.
The report's authors say the Bush Administration systematically exaggerated the evidence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
One of the authors of the Carnegie Endowment report says Bush Administration officials most likely pushed intelligence agencies to find evidence to back their view that Iraq presented a danger.
The report finds United Nations inspections had worked far better than realised and that the US intelligence process failed.
It says the evidence shows Iraq had dismantled its weapons of mass destruction program by the mid-90s and that the US Government misrepresented the level of threat Iraq posed.
The Carnegie Endowment relied on declassified intelligence reports and material from the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in reaching its conclusions.
