http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/07/09...e_report040709
Senate report slams CIA on Iraq intelligence
Last Updated Fri, 09 Jul 2004 21:57:21
WASHINGTON - Pre-war intelligence reports claiming Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction were wrong and overstated, according to a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report.
"In the end, what the president and the Congress used to send the country to war was information that was provided by the intelligence community and that information was flawed," said Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican committee chair.
Intelligence reports leading up to the war indicated that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, mobile weapons labs and had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.
"Today we know these assessments were wrong. And, as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," Roberts said.
Roberts said most of the key judgments in the October 2002 national intelligence estimate on Iraq's WMD programs "were either overstated or were not supported by the raw intelligence reporting."
Senator John Rockefeller, the Democratic vice-chair on the committee, said mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq rank among "the most devastating losses and intelligence failures in the history of the nation."
"The administration at all levels used bad information to bolster its case for war," he said.
"We in Congress would not have authorized the war…if we knew what we know now," he said.
Roberts said he didn't know if he would have supported the war in light of the report. He said he still may have approved it based on humanitarian grounds with the goal of eliminating the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein.
'Group think' intelligence failure
Roberts said intelligence analysts fell victim to "group think" assumptions that Iraq had weapons that it did not.
But Roberts said this "group think" extended to American allies and the United Nations members who also believed Saddam Hussein posed a threat.
"This was a global intelligence failure," he said.
The report also blasts departing CIA Director George Tenet, accusing him of skewing advice to top policy-makers and ignoring dissenting views from other intelligence agencies overseen by the state or defence departments.
The report also blames the CIA for not sharing information with other intelligence agencies and slammed the agency for not having any human intelligence in Iraq after 1998 and the exit of the UN inspectors.
The report criticized analysts for taking parts of questionable information and making overreaching conclusions that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The report is the first of two parts of a study conducted by the Senate's Select Intelligence Committee.
It explores how the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other U.S. government intelligence agencies collected, interpreted and ultimately delivered assessments of how dangerous Iraq could be to the United States, given its alleged weapons of mass destruction and its alleged connections to extremist groups such as al-Qaeda.
So far, no weapons of mass destruction have been found despite intense coalition searches, and there is now widespread doubt about Iraq having connections to foreign militant groups before the 2003 war began.
Two more reports dealing with intelligence failures are also expected this summer:
The independent 9/11 Commission is scheduled to release its final report on the same day the Democratic convention opens this month in Boston.
A final report on the failure to find Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction will be made public in August or September.
Democrats on the committee had wanted the White House's use of the intelligence reports to be part of the study's formal mandate, but the Republicans, who control the committee, voted against that.
As a result, the second part of the Senate study, exploring the White House's actions, will likely be released after the November presidential election.
Although there was a unanimous vote on the report, there were disagreements mostly along partisan lines.
Rockefeller said there was a "real frustration" about what was left out of the report, "especially on the question of whether the administration pressured the intelligence community to reach predetermined, in my judgment, conclusions."
The Butler report on British pre-war intelligence is due out July 14.
Written by CBC News Online staff
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I would like to know from an American point of view what this means to the typical American. Is this report damaging to the Bush administration or will the CIA take the brunt? Since the CIA is under the wing of the government, will this report get legs and see the dismissal of varying personnel or have people made their minds up already and don't care anymore? Do you as Americans feel betrayed by the aforementioned or is this just big government doing what they do in the best interest of its citizens? Where do you stand?