WASHINGTON — The top Marine commander in Iraq said Friday that U.S. intelligence was "simply wrong" in its assessment that Saddam Hussein intended to unleash chemical or biological weapons against U.S. forces during the war, but he stopped short of saying there was an overall intelligence failure.
Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, also said he had fully expected U.S. forces to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction after the war ended.
"It was a surprise to me then, it remains a surprise to me now, that we have not uncovered weapons," Conway said from Baghdad in a teleconference call with reporters in Washington.
"It's not for lack of trying," he said. "We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there."
The subject of the search for banned weapons is becoming an increasingly uncomfortable one for the Bush administration, with several influential lawmakers this week saying they believe the White House hyped the Iraq threat or was misled by the intelligence community. Other critics have alleged that the Pentagon pressured the intelligence community to skew its analyses.
Amid the mounting criticism, CIA Director George J. Tenet took the unusual step of issuing a statement Friday denying that the agency's assessments on Iraq were politicized.
"Our role is to call it like we see it -- to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and what we base it on," Tenet said. "That is exactly what was done and continues to be done on intelligence issues related to Iraq."
He added that he was proud of the work done by the agency's analysts, saying, "The integrity of our process was maintained throughout."
Conway, the Marine commander, acknowledged that "intelligence failure" is "too strong a word to use at this point." But he said: "What the regime was intending to do in terms of its use of the weapons, we thought we understood -- or we certainly had our best guess, our most dangerous, our most likely courses of action that the intelligence folks were giving us. We were simply wrong.
"But whether or not we're wrong at the national level, I think, still very much remains to be seen."
Conway, who said he still believes it is possible that weapons of mass destruction will be found, spoke as the Pentagon disclosed details of its plans to send a new team of more than 1,000 experts to search for evidence of banned weapons. Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency's human intelligence service, will lead the effort.
