US President George W. Bush on Friday named a commission to investigate the yawning gap between pre-war claims about Iraqi weapons and post-invasion findings then report back well after the November elections.
In hastily arranged remarks at the White House, Bush noted that US arms hunters have not found the chemical and biological arsenals at the core of his case for invading Iraq and said: "We are determined to figure out why."
The bipartisan nine-member commission will "look at America's intelligence capabilities, especially our intelligence about weapons of mass destruction," and must report to the president by March 31, 2005, he said.
It was unclear whether any of the findings would be made public.
Critics pounced, saying that Bush had given himself "political cover" by hand-picking the panel, pushing off potentially damaging findings until after the election, and limiting the scope of its investigation to intelligence failures, not whether the administration exaggerated the case for war.
"The commission has been told to ignore the elephant in the middle of the room, which is how the intelligence was used and misused by President Bush, Vice President [Dick] Cheney, and other senior Administration officials," said Democratic Representative Henry Waxman.
Bush said he had directed federal agencies to cooperate fully with the panel to be led by former Virginia governor and ex-senator Charles Robb, a Democrat, and retired appeals judge Laurence Silberman, a staunch conservative.
He also named Republican Senator John McCain, a frequent critic of the administration who was among the first to call for launching such an independent probe, to the commission.
Bush, who dropped his opposition to launching such an investigation just last weekend, left two seats vacant but indicated they would be filled when other members cleared the vetting process.
It was unclear whether one of the remaining two slots might be filled by David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) who has blamed a massive intelligence failure for pre-war charges that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons.
But Bush set the stage for reporting intelligence successes as well as failures by tasking the commission to look also into North Korea's weapons programs, as well as on threats posed by Libya before it agreed to disarm and Afghanistan before US forces ousted the Taliban.
On Thursday, Tenet passionately defended the Central Intelligence Agency's role in gathering intelligence about Saddam Hussein's supposed efforts to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
And he denied that political leaders pressured analysts to exaggerate the threat. "No one told us what to say or how to say it," Tenet said.
In related news, Tenet, has agreed to stay in his post at least through the end of the year, according to three people close to Tenet.
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