A SENIOR American intelligence official involved in analysing the threat from Iraq accused the Bush Administration last night of being “blind and deaf” to any evidence contradicting its case for war.

Greg Thielmann, former director of the strategic, proliferation and military affairs office in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said that President Bush and his aides picked out details from intelligence reports that supported their arguments and dramatised the threat from Saddam Hussein, while ignoring others.

“Senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence,” he told the CBS 60 Minutes programme. “They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce.

“I would assign some blame to the intelligence community and most of the blame to the senior Administration officials.

“They were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem more alarmist and more dangerous.”

Mr Thielmann left his post before General Colin Powell’s 75-minute address to the United Nations on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programmes in February. He described that presentation as “not very honest”. In London, meanwhile, the head of an authoritative international institute said that the war on Iraq had actually boosted the al-Qaeda terrorist organisation.

One of President Bush’s stated reasons for invading Iraq was to prevent Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

That goal had been achieved, but the invasion had also generated wider support for Osama bin Laden’s organisation among radical Muslims, John Chipman, director of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, said.

“On the plus side, war in Iraq has denied al-Qaeda a potential supplier of weapons of mass destruction and discouraged state sponsors of terrorism from continuing to support it,” the institute’s annual Military Balance reported.

But, it continued: “On the minus side, war in Iraq has probably inflamed radical passions among Muslims and thus increased al-Qaeda’s recruiting power and morale, and, at least marginally, its operating capability.”

Anti-American resistance in Iraq could develop into a “cause célèbre for radical Islamic terrorists,” the report said.

Dr Chipman predicted: “Jihadists (holy war Islamic extremists) could regard a spectacular attack on US personnel in Iraq, like Hezbollah’s 1983 suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon which killed 241, as a feasible substitute until it is ready to attempt another mass-casualty attack on American soil.”

The institute’s director admitted that the international community might have been wrong about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Last year there had been consensus within the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council that Iraq had probably retained elements of its WMD programme, such as stocks of chemical agents. “This was probably incorrect,” he said. Furthermore, the assessment that Iraq also had operational longer-range ballistic missiles, such as the 650km (400-mile) al-Hussein weapon, was “overdrawn”.

But he believed that it would take six to nine months of more searches by the Iraq Survey Group before a fuller picture could be established.

“What may emerge is a better understanding of the range of Iraq’s ambitions which, if left unchecked, may have allowed Iraq’s capacities to mature to a level where their threat to the region really was important,” Dr Chipman said.

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