LOS ANGELES, Jan. 16 (UPI) -- A top Democrat on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee said she had yet to hear an explanation of mistaken assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
California Rep. Jane Harman said Friday that the Bush administration and the intelligence community had been asked months ago to explain why pre-war assessments were so certain that Iraq had a thriving WMD program when little evidence of such weapons had been discovered since the invasion.
Harman was among the House Democrats who contended in a new report that the United States needed to both come up with a better intelligence product and increase its sense of urgency to plug gaps in its anti-terrorism efforts.
Harman declined to accuse the White House of manipulating information, but speculated that a mindset had developed among intelligence officials that allowed assessments to be blown out of proportion at the expense of dissenting views.
