Did US and Bush administration allow the UN weapons inspections to be performed in good faith?

CIA withheld intel from UNMOVIC

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did not give UN weapons inspectors a complete list of sites to scrutinize in Iraq before the US invasion, as the White House had claimed, according to a report by the New York Times. In the run-up to the war last year, White House officials had repeatedly accused the UNMOVIC weapons inspectors of dragging their feet over alleged banned weapons hidden at various facilities in Iraq, and had claimed that UNMOVIC had been briefed on all intelligence related to alleged Iraqi weapons stores or arms depots. If no WMD had been found, the White House hinted in early 2003, it was probably because of UNMOVIC's reluctance to follow up on leads supplied by the US intelligence community. Democratic Senator Carl Levin received a letter on 20 January from the CIA's Congressional Affairs department stating that information on 21 out of 105 sites that the CIA allegedly found suspicious was withheld from the UNMOVIC team, the Times reported. Both CIA chief George Tenet and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice have stated publicly that the US briefed the United Nations inspectors on all sites of "high value and moderate value", the Times said. No details were available on the identity or nature of the alleged weapons sites for which information was apparently withheld. Senator Levin said that he now believed that Tenet had misled Congress, which he said was "totally unacceptable". Levin suspected that the administration had held back information in order to persuade the public that UN inspections had reached the limits of their usefulness. However, no forbidden weapons have been discovered since the US invasion of Iraq, and the White House has shifted the justification for its attack from Saddam Hussein's arsenal to his purported "desire" to acquire chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons. To justify its attack on Iraq, the White House has in the past cited a non-existent IAEA report that Iraq was about to acquire nuclear
weapons; a plagiarized "dossier" based on information that was over a decade old; and a report on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger that the CIA said was an obvious forgery. The latest exposure of false information from the Bush
administration will likely help Democrat front-runner John Kerry add to the pressure building on the White House in the current presidential campaign.