The two points that Donald Rumsfeld stressed upon vigorously many times when it came to the question of Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction was that, "lack of evidence of it (WMDs) was not evidence of the lack of it." He reinforced this point further by saying that that even a "trained ape" knew it was true.

The report of the commission set up by President Bush to determine the intelligence capabilities, have come out with a most damning indictment of US intelligence agencies for getting it "dead wrong" about Iraq's WMDs. And to think that such a mess in Iraq, with more than hundred thousand Iraqi civilian deaths and more than 1,500 US soldiers killed, has all been the consequences of botched intelligence analysis. And nobody will be made to answer for this death and destruction.

It is not that the findings of the latest, and some suggest the last, presidential commission on Iraq, is anything new or that the commission has provided a different insight into the matter. It has merely confirmed what the rest of the world, except perhaps for Bush and Blair, knew to be true, and what the previous commissions had revealed. And contrary to what Rumsfeld believed, it has been confirmed once again, as if it needed any confirmation in the first place, that all the stories about Iraq possessing WMDs remains what it was, a complete myth.

But, what the commission has helped to do, however, is to absolve the Bush administration of any culpability in initiating the Iraqi mayhem, by skirting the larger issue of how the intelligence was used by the administration. It was not within the commission's terms of reference to detect any connection between the intelligence failure and the Bush administration's decision to go to war on unsubstantiated intelligence. According to the commission's co-chairman, Laurence Silberman, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policy makers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry." That was only to be expected.

It is no secret that all actions that are necessary to keep that issue under wraps have been taken by the US president and his Congressional allies. The Robert Committee, which was set up precisely to address that particular issue, and whose report was put on hold till after the elections, appears now to be inconsequential. This was made abundantly clear by the comments of the chairman of the committee, Pat Roberts, "We have now heard it all regarding prewar intelligence," and that it would be a "monumental waste of time" to investigate further.

The WMD Commission has attracted interest for not what it has revealed but because of the many things that it has not revealed. It may not be entirely accidental that the committee ignored, according to one commentator, "a voluminous body of evidence suggesting the Bush administration blatantly pressured analysts, dismissed conflicting data, and grossly overstated a shaky case in an effort to mislead the American people to war." And that too based on one man's account of the Iraqi WMDs. The intelligence community in the US pegged all the arguments and analysis to validate the notion that Saddam was not only a threat, but that immediate action against him was an imperative, on the report of one single source. The commission has revealed that the CIA had depended solely on one source, code-named Curveball, whose credentials turned out to be unreliable and whose reports turned out to be false and fabricated.

Although the Silberman Commission has hedged many important issues, some of the findings have been rather extraordinary and confirm the fact that intelligence analysis was formulated to fit preconceived opinion and predetermined decision rather than the reverse. This is what we call in the military parlance "situating the appreciation" to fit predetermined action plan rather than "appreciating the situation" to arrive rationally to certain courses of action. The intelligence fed the president and his hawks what he wanted to hear and not what he should hear. According to the report, what the intelligence agencies indulged in was "the] 'selling' [of] intelligence -- in order to keep…

the First Customer interested." It kept the "First Customer" happy also because it helped him to pull wool over the eyes of his credulous countrymen and obtain their acquiescence for going to a war whose conceptualisation predated 9/11; the preliminary thoughts on a possible Iraq invasion were put together well before the al Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers.

To think that the largest and the biggest intelligence apparatus in the world with 15 agencies and a budget of almost $40 billion would not double check information from a source, an Iraqi defector, who was handled not by them but by another country, is incomprehensible, unless, of course, the common belief, that the ultimate objective of the entire intelligence exercise leading up to March 20, 2003, was to manufacture and mould intelligence to conform to the plans drawn up by the Bush neo-cons, is taken as true.

This view is validated by the committee's conclusions that "U.S. intelligence agencies' reliance on Curveball and their failure to scrutinise his claims are the primary reason" that the CIA and other spy agencies "fundamentally misjudged the status of Iraq's [biological weapons] programs." This is, one could surmise, a veiled attempt to also salvage the intelligence community.

But the fundamental flaw in the judgments caused by lack of scrutiny is hard to accept also. It is because many that did not concur with the analysis and pointed out the possible shortcomings have had to leave the job. Reports have it that no heed was paid to urgent e-mails and cables sent by CIA officers to former secretary of state Colin Powell, expressing grave doubts about the so called mobile labs that he was going to cite to prop up his claims of Iraq's WMD programme, in his February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council. And those that have fed doctored analysis have been bestowed with national honours or with very high positions in national or international institutions.

For the impartial observer the only conclusion that he can draw from this report is that it is an exercise to bail out the Bush administration of the charges of deliberate fixing the intelligence to validate arguments in favour of the Iraqi invasion. The convenient horse to flog is the intelligence agencies, whose "failures" have been used as a fig leaf to hide the follies of the administration. There are serious implications on both counts.

One is also at a loss as to what to make of Donald Rumsfeld's analogy to our less developed anthropoid cousins. I am hesitant to believe that the American people apparently entrusted their safety to an administration that, by the facts brought out in the report, have proved about as good as the "trained apes" referenced in Mr. Rumsfeld's unfortunate phraseology.

The author is Editor, Defence and Strategic Affairs, The Daily Star.