[Vision2020] 03-31-05 Washington Post: WMD Commission Releases Scathing Report

[Art Deco]

[Pat:  Let me know if you get a script error, please.]
  
  
washingtonpost.com
 
WMD Commission Releases Scathing Report 
Panel Finds U.S. Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons Was 'Dead Wrong' 
By Katherin Shrader
The Associated Press
Thursday, March 31, 2005; 12:25 PM 


America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most prewar assessments about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and know disturbingly little about current nuclear threats, a presidential commission said Thursday.

"Our collection agencies are often unable to gather intelligence on the very things we care the most about," the panel concluded in an unsparing report.

It recommended dozens of organizational changes, and said President Bush can implement most of them without congressional action. It also urged the president to back up John Negroponte, his choice to be the new director of national intelligence, in any bureaucratic turf battles ahead.

"The central conclusion is one which I share. America's intelligence community needs fundamental change," Bush said at the White House after receiving the critique from a commission he was at first reluctant to appoint.

He said he had directed Fran Townsend, his White House-based homeland security adviser, to "review the commission's finding and to assure that concrete actions are taken."

Bush read a prepared statement, flanked by retired Judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican, and former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb of Virginia, co-chairmen of the panel.

The president then strode from the room, leaving the two men behind to field questions on the report that criticized past performance -- but didn't stop there.

"Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors," the report said.

The commission also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office.

Robb and Silberman agreed they had found no evidence that senior administration officials had sought to change the prewar intelligence in Iraq, possibly for political gain.

Robb said investigators examined every allegation "to see if there was any occasion where a member of the administration or anyone else had asked an analyst or anyone else associated with the intelligence community to change a position they were taking or whether they felt there was any undue influence. And we found absolutely no instance."

In the months preceding the Iraq war, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly invoked Saddam Hussein's presumed possession of weapons of mass destruction as a reason to invade.

The report was the latest tabulation of intelligence shortfalls documented in a series of investigations since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 against the United States. Numerous investigations have concluded that spy agencies had serious intelligence failures before the attacks. Thursday's report concluded that the problem still has not been fixed, three years after al Qaeda struck America.

"The flaws we found in the intelligence community's Iraq performance are still all too common," it said.

At the news conference, Robb was particularly blunt when it came to turf wars within the intelligence bureaucracy. Negroponte "needs the full and unequivocal backing" of the president, he said, adding that there are "very distinguished and proud agencies whose culture will work against change."

The report said "The daily intelligence briefings given to you (Bush) before the Iraq war were flawed. Through attention-grabbing headlines and repetition of questionable data, these briefings overstated the case that Iraq was rebuilding its WMD programs."

In an implicit swipe at the Bush administration, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the report did not review how federal policy-makers used the intelligence they were given.

"I believe it is essential that we hold both the intelligence agencies and senior policy-makers accountable for their actions," Reid said.

The unclassified version does not go into significant detail on the intelligence community's assessment of countries such as Iran, North Korea, China and Russia because commissioners did not want to tip the U.S. hand about what is known. Those details are included in the classified version.

Sen. Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was pleased by the report and indicated that it concludes all inquiries into intelligence used to make the case for going to war with Iraq.

"I don't think there should be any doubt that we have now heard it all regarding prewar intelligence," the Kansas Republican said. "I think that it would be a monumental waste of time to re-plow this ground any further."

Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said the failures were widespread.

"I don't think you can blame any one person, although the buck does stop at the top of every one of these agencies," Skelton said. "But quite honestly, the fault is spread out across all the agencies."

Bush appointed the commission a year ago, signing on to the idea of an independent investigation only belatedly. The White House had said it wanted to give the weapons search in Iraq more time.

But pressure grew from Republicans and Democrats alike after the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, resigned saying the prewar estimates of weapons in Iraq, which Bush used to justify war there, "were almost all wrong." Even then, the White House insisted the commission's mandate be broadened to other nations, prompting criticism that the panel might be too overloaded to thoroughly examine its original subject, Iraq.

"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the report said. "This was a major intelligence failure."

The main cause was the intelligence community's "inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, it said, and serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence.

"On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude," the report said.

On al Qaeda, the commission found that the intelligence community was surprised by the terrorist network's advances in biological weapons, particularly a virulent strain of a disease that the report keeps secret, identifying it only as "Agent X."


© 2005 The Associated Press 
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