A US Senate Intelligence Committee report about prewar intelligence on Iraq will be "tough and damning" and spread the blame around, a senior Republican senator said this evening.
"It will be damning of some of the intelligence. I think it's going to be highly critical, it will be critical of a lot of different programs and people," said Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, third-ranking in the Senate Republican leadership.
The blame spreads over Democratic and Republican administrations, intelligence agencies and Congress, he said. "Nobody is without blame."
The report is expected to be issued this spring, possibly in April.
Mr Kyl's comments came in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations aimed at countering harsh criticism of the Republican administration by Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, a week earlier to the same group.
Mr Kennedy's case that the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence to Congress and the public to go to war against Iraq was "long on innuendo and very short on facts," Mr Kyl said.
Administration officials had based their comments about Iraq on intelligence assessments, he said. "They did not ... distort, mislead, or misrepresent what the intelligence community said."
US intelligence reports before the war said Iraq had biological and chemical weapons and was developing a nuclear weapon, but since the US-led invasion last year no such banned weapons have been found.