WASHINGTON - A presidential commission on US intelligence lapses said Thursday assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destructions were "dead wrong" and that the damage to US credibility will take years to repair.
The panel also told President George W. Bush that for all the debate over intelligence operations in Iraq, US agencies still had precious little information on other potential nuclear threats such as Iran and North Korea.
The White House said it would quickly act on the conclusions in the final report presented by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.
"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the panel said in a cover letter to Bush after a year of study.
It said in the conclusion to its 600-page report that "the harm done to American credibility by our all too public intelligence failures in Iraq will take years to undo."
The report took the US intelligence community severely to task for a series of shortcomings it said led to the false conclusion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, justifying the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
It cited analyses compromised by pre-war assumptions of Saddam's intentions, problems in the collection of data and the failure to communicate to policymakers just how little hard intelligence they had.
But the bi-partisan panel, headed by former federal judge Laurence Silberman and ex-senator Charles Robb, stayed clear of whether the Bush administration exaggerated the intelligence to rationalize its military move into Iraq.
"We were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community," the commission said, adding it confined itself strictly to the performance of intelligence agencies.
The 10-member panel told Bush it "found no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
"What the intelligence professionals told you about Saddam Hussein's programs was what they believed. They were simply wrong."
The panel expressed concern about intelligence on Iran, North Korea, China and Russia, telling Bush, "We still know disturbingly little about the weapons programs and even less about the intentions of many of our most dangerous adversaries."
It kept most of its findings classified but said in the report made public that "we found that we have only limited access to critical information about several of these high-priority intelligence targets."
The report issued a series of recommendations to beef up intelligence-gathering operations, including stronger and more centralized management and a bolstering of the authority of the newly created director of national intelligence.
The panel also called for the creation of a "genuinely integrated community" to replace what it said was still a loose confederation of independent agencies.
But the report predicted some resistance to its suggestions, saying that if steps were taken to improve intelligence agencies after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, less had been done in response to the failures in Iraq.
"We believe that many within the agencies do not accept the conclusion that we reached after our year of study: that the Community needs fundamental change if it is to successfully confront the threats of the 21st century."
The White House welcomed the report and Bush was to meet Thursday with members of the commission.
"We're going to carefully review each recommendation and we will act on those recommendations in a fairly quick period of time," spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.
"We haven't transformed to meet the threats that we face now," he said, pointing to fears that terrorists like those who carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks could acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Bush went to war in Iraq on grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and sought nuclear arms. But none has been found and US-led forces have abandoned the search for them.
The White House has since shifted its public rationale for the March 2003 invasion from the weapons to the oppressive nature of Saddam's regime and what Washington says is the need to spread democracy in the Middle East.
"Saddam Hussein's regime was a dangerous one, and a destabilizing force in a dangerous part of the world," said McClellan. "We are working to transform that part of the world."

03/31/2005 15:47 GMT