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Senate Report Slams ‘Misleading’ Prewar Intelligence

Posted: Sunday July 11, 2004 12:50 AM EST

WASHINGTON – The US Senate Intelligence Committee concluded Friday, July 10, that the CIA’s rationale to invade Iraq was “overstated, misleading or incorrect”.

The document, entitled “Report on the US Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq”, further found no evidence of Iraq’s complicity with Al-Qaeda network, reported the CNN.

Chairman of the bipartisan committee Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) said the prewar intelligence was based on assessments that were “unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence”.

“Before the war, the US intelligence community told the president as well as the Congress and the public that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and if left unchecked would probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade,” CNN quoted Roberts as saying.

“Today we know these assessments were wrong,” he summed up the committee’s conclusions contained in a 511-page report, which has been heavily blanked out.

The lawmaker listed several points emphasized in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that were “overstated” or “not supported by the raw intelligence reporting”.

Among these were claims that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, had chemical and biological weapons, and was developing an unmanned aerial vehicle, probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents.

Roberts said the US intelligence community failed to “accurately or adequately explain the uncertainties behind the judgments in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to policymakers”.

After six moths of searching for Iraq’s alleged nuclear arsenal, a group of CIA-hired inspectors failed to find any traces of weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration embarrassment culminated in the resignation of the head of the American team, David Kay, who said publicly that he did not believe Iraq possessed any chemical or biological weapons.

Bipartisan Differences

Although senators from both parties agreed in berating the CIA, Democrats and Republicans clashed over whether administration officials had pressured intelligence analysts to reach predetermined conclusions on the Iraq threat.

“The committee found no evidence that the intelligence community’s mischaracterization or exaggeration of intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of politics or pressure,” Roberts said.

However, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the leading Democrat on the 18-member panel, said pressure was in the form of “ambiance” and comments from top White House officials, something he says he could not include in the official report.

Several critics of the prewar intelligence had expressed concerned about visits to the CIA by Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials.

A group of former senior CIA officials have accused the vice president of exploiting his office to insist on the inclusion of a false claim about Iraq’s efforts to buy uranium from Niger in Bush’s State of the Union address.

The White House admitted last July that Bush was provided with faulty information in the address and that his administration overstated the threat posed by the ousted Iraqi regime in the run up to attacking Iraq.

Outgoing CIA Director George Tenet had admitted that he was to blame for the overstatement.

No Saddam-Osama Ties

The report further found that there was no “established formal relationship” between Al-Qaeda network of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam.

“The Central Intelligence Agency’s assessment that to date there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an Al-Qaeda attack was reasonable and objective. No additional information has emerged to suggest otherwise,” said the report.

“No evidence existed of Iraq’s complicity or assistance in Al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks, including 9/11,” said Rockefeller.

Bush and his top aides have stood firm on assertions of links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, with Cheney forcefully maintaining that evidence may yet emerge depicting an Iraqi role in the 9/11 attacks blamed by Washington on Al-Qaeda.

Shortcomings

The CIA’s number-two acknowledged “shortcomings” in the prewar intelligence.

“We recognize those shortcomings and, long before today’s report, have taken a number of steps to address them and to ensure that they are not repeated,” John McLaughlin told a press conference at CIA headquarters.

“Although we think the judgments were not unreasonable when they were made nearly two years ago, we understand with all we have learned since then that we could have done better,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted him as saying.

“One significant error was in allowing the key judgments in our Iraq estimate to be published without sufficient caveats and disclaimers where our knowledge was incomplete.”

But to the charge that the conclusions were not supported by intelligence reporting, he said, “In truth, there was quite a lot of underlying intelligence. It varied in quality from issue to issue.”

He said the intelligence was “more fragmentary on chemical weapons, for example, and nuclear weapons.”

Haunting America

Sen. Rockefeller said that the “intelligence failures” will haunt America’s national security “for generations to come.”

“Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower,” CNN quoted the West Virginia Democrat as saying.

“We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before.”

The senior legislator said that “bad information” was used to bolster the case for war.

Roberts added that the panel concluded that the intelligence community suffered “from what we call a collective group think, which led analysts and collectors and managers to presume that Iraq had active and growing WMD programs”.

“This group think caused the community to interpret ambiguous evidence, such as the procurement of dual-use technology, as conclusive evidence of the existence of WMD programs.”

“We in Congress would not have authorized that war with 75 votes if we knew what we know now,” Rockefeller continued.

“Leading up to September 11, our government didn’t connect the dots. In Iraq, we are even more culpable because the dots themselves never existed.”

The American mass-circulation The New York Times said the report is a condemnation of how the Bush administration has squandered the public trust.

In a season when candor and leadership are in short supply, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the prewar assessment of Iraqi weapons is a welcome demonstration of both. It is also disturbing, and not just because of what it says about the atrocious state of American intelligence,” the daily said in its Saturday editorial.

Last Week, Bush’s chief ally British Prime Minister Tony Blair also acknowledged that weapons of mass destruction may never be found in Iraq.

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