related weapons programmes in its report last year came up with similar conclusions as the presidential commission but was also prohibited from looking at the political and policymaking aspects. Jack Spencer, a national security analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the blame has been on the intelligence community "maybe because that's the way it should be". Spencer said there was a long-standing belief that Iraq possessed illegal weapons in the years before Bush took office, and this belief was also shared by most of the world, including allies that opposed the war. "That was what everyone thought," he said. The latest investigation blasted the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence gatherers for being "dead wrong" in assessing Saddam's weapons capability. "We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgements about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the panel's report, released Thursday, said. --More 2134 Local Time 1834 GMT
