Report blasts data used to justify war

WASHINGTON – The intelligence community provided badly flawed information in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, with CIA assertions about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities built on overstated, unsupported or false analyses, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a harshly critical report Friday.

The “slam dunk” on intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs – a term CIA Director George Tenet reportedly used when asked by President Bush how solid was the case against Iraq – is nowhere to be found in the Senate committee’s 511-page report.

Instead, the committee sketches a devastating picture of flawed assumptions and unwillingness to challenge widely held perceptions about the extent of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs; overreliance on defectors and foreign intelligence services; and a total absence of U.S. spies inside Iraq in the five years leading up to the war.

The report lambastes the CIA and other intelligence agencies for falling victim to “group think” that Iraq retained a chemical and biological arsenal after the 1991 Gulf War and was reconstituting its nuclear program. The committee also faulted the agencies for not adequately explaining to policymakers the uncertainties behind the intelligence judgments.

“There is simply no question that mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq rank among the most devastating losses and intelligence failures in the history of the nation,” said Sen. John Rockefeller, top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, at a news conference with Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan.

“This report cries out for reform,” Roberts said, though he said Congress needs to move carefully in overhauling an intelligence community that spans 15 agencies and has a budget estimated at more than $40 billion.

During a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, Bush said he welcomed the report and was open to reform.

“I want to know how to make the agencies better, to make sure that we’re better able to gather the information necessary to protect the American people,” he said. “One of the vital ingredients of keeping us safe is to gather the best intelligence we can gather.”

Bush defended anew his decision to go to war.

“We haven’t found the stockpiles, but we knew (Saddam) could make them,” he said. “The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.”

The House and Senate intelligence committees initiated sweeping investigations after it became evident after the war started that the U.S. may have had flawed information. The House report is months away from release.

The Senate report, approved unanimously by the committee’s Republican and Democrat members, concluded there was no evidence that the Bush administration “attempted to coerce, influence or pressure” intelligence analysts to shape their findings to make the case for war.

But Rockefeller sought to undercut that conclusion Friday, saying he believed analysts were under intense pressure to reach predetermined conclusions. In one of nine “additional views” attached to the report, Rockefeller and two other committee Democrats said analysts were repeatedly asked to reconsider their judgments.

They cited an internal CIA review of intelligence on Iraq, the Kerr Commission, which reported in 2003 that there was “significant pressure” on the intelligence community to draw a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Roberts denied any undue pressure was applied and defended the policymakers’ questions to analysts as a necessary give-and-take that sharpened the intelligence product. “I hope to heck there was pressure by the policymakers,” he said. “You have to be forward-leaning. We just went through 9-11.”

The committee’s yearlong investigation did not address a topic of keen interest to congressional Democrats: whether Bush and top aides twisted intelligence to buttress their case for war.

While the committee has begun a second phase of its investigation examining that question, Democrats voiced frustration that the review is unlikely to be completed before the election.

“The American people have a right to know how that faulty intelligence was used,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “You had faulty intelligence that was then independently compounded by an administration looking for every conceivable rationale for going to war.”

Investigators in Iraq to date have not uncovered signs of a nuclear or biological weapons program and have found only small amounts of chemical weapons.

“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,” Roberts said, adding that he does not know if Congress would endorse the war on the basis of the current understanding of Iraq’s threat.

In a rare news conference at the CIA, Deputy Director John McLaughlin said the agency has revamped operations to address shortcomings identified by the intelligence committee and others.

“My first message to you is a very simple one: We get it,” he said. “Although we think the judgments were not unreasonable when they were made nearly two years ago, we understand with all that we have learned since then that we could have done better.”

The report, which comes just two days before Tenet ends his seven-year tenure as the CIA’s director, is sharply critical of him.

The analysis faults him for not personally reviewing Bush’s State of the Union address in 2003, which contained discredited allegations that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Africa.

It also accuses Tenet of presenting only the CIA’s views during his daily briefings with the president, failing to showcase dissenting views from other intelligence agencies such as the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

And it criticizes Tenet and other intelligence community managers for not forcing analysts and intelligence collectors to challenge their assumptions and fully consider alternative arguments. The report also was critical of the reliance on spy satellites and other sources of intelligence rather than placing U.S. spies in Iraq.

“Most, if not all, of these problems stem from a broken corporate culture and poor management, and will not be solved by additional funding and personnel,” the report concluded.