A leading figure in the Bush administration's march to war in Iraq used questionable intelligence about Saddam Hussein's links to al Qaeda to help justify the 2003 invasion, a Pentagon watchdog agency said in a report today.
The conclusion by former US defense policy chief Douglas Feith's office that there was a "mature symbiotic relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda was inconsistent with the intelligence community's view, the Pentagon inspector general's report said.
Acting inspector general Thomas Gimble, who produced the classified report after one-year investigation, concluded Mr Feith was authorized by senior Pentagon officials to pursue alternative intelligence analyses and his actions were lawful.
But Mr Feith's actions were sometimes "inappropriate" because they "did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intelligence community," an unclassified two-page executive summary of the report said.
Top administration officials, including vice president Dick Cheney, used claims of a relationship between al Qaeda and prewar Iraq to suggest that Saddam could have had a role in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Senior officials at the time, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were dissatisfied that the CIA assessment did not more closely link Iraq and al Qaeda.
Mr Feith, who left the government in 2005, said he welcomed the finding that his activities were legal and authorized, but said it was "an absurd position" to say his activities were inappropriate.
"It, of course, varied from (the) consensus. It was a criticism of that consensus. That is why it was written," he said in a statement.