Iraq War 'Waged On False Intelligence'
By Sarah Left and agencies
10 July , 2004
The Guardian
The US launched a war on Iraq on the basis of false and overstated intelligence, according to a scathing US senate intelligence committee report released today.
Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chaired the bipartisan committee, said CIA assessments that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and could make a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade were wrong.
"As the report will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," he said.
The committee's vice chairman, Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller, went a step further today, telling reporters: "We in Congress would not have authorised that war, we would not have authorised that war with 75 votes, if we knew what we know now."
While the report is harshly critical of the CIA, it does not address the role played by the administration of the US president, George Bush.
Following pressure from Republicans on the committee, the report is being published in two phases, with the White House being spared the committee's scrutiny until phase two begins. The second part of the report may not be published until after the presidential election takes place in November.
Mr Roberts said: "The committee found no evidence that the intelligence community's mischaracterisation or exaggeration of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of politics or pressure. 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."
But Mr Rockefeller insisted: "The central issue of how intelligence on Iraq was, in this senator's opinion, exaggerated by the Bush administration officials, was relegated to that second phase, as yet unbegun, of the committee investigation, along with other issues."
He insisted that, in the run-up to war, the Bush administration had repeatedly characterised the threat from Iraq "in more ominous and threatening terms than any intelligence would have allowed".
The CIA insisted that 20% of the report should remain hidden from the public on national security grounds.
The report repeatedly condemns the departing CIA director, George Tenet, accusing him of skewing advice to top policy-makers with the CIA's view, and casting aside dissenting views from other intelligence agencies overseen by the state or defence departments.
It blames Mr Tenet for not personally reviewing Mr Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, which contained since-discredited references to Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium in Africa. Mr Tenet has resigned, and leaves his post on Sunday.
"Tragically, the intelligence failures set forth in this report will affect our national security for generations to come," Mr Rockefeller said.
"Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower. 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."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, travelling with Mr Bush on a campaign trip today, said the committee's report essentially "agrees with what we have said, which is we need to take steps to continue strengthening and reforming our intelligence capabilities so we are prepared to meet the new threats that we face in this day and age."
Intelligence analysts worked from the assumption that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to make more, as well as trying to revive a nuclear weapons programme.
In fact, investigations after the invasion of the country unearthed no indication that Saddam had a nuclear weapons programme or biological weapons. Only small quantities of chemical weapons have ever been found.
Analysts ignored or discounted conflicting information because of their assumptions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the report said.
"This 'group think' dynamic led intelligence community analysts, collectors and managers to both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD programme as well as ignore or minimise evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programmes," the report concluded.
Such assumptions had also led analysts to inflate snippets of questionable information into broad declarations that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, the report said.