We’ll be hearing a lot about this:
The key U.S. assertions leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq — that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons — were wrong and based on false or overstated CIA analyses, a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report asserted Friday.
Intelligence analysts fell victim to “group think” assumptions that Iraq had weapons that it did not, concluded the bipartisan report.
Many factors contributing to those failures are ongoing problems within the U.S. intelligence community — which cannot be fixed with more money alone, it said.
Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who heads the committee, told reporters that 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. “This was a global intelligence failure.”
The report repeatedly blasts departing CIA Director George Tenet, accusing him of skewing advice to top policy-makers with the CIA’s view and elbowing out dissenting views from other intelligence agencies overseen by the State or Defense departments.
But let’s not forget this:
What’s missing is the ways intelligence was used, misused, misinterpreted or ignored by administration policymakers in deciding to go to war and in making the case to the American people that war with Iraq was necessary. The intelligence committee leadership chose to defer these issues to a second report — one that will not be released until after the November elections.
While failures by the CIA and other intelligence agencies are a significant part of the problem identified in this inquiry, the responsibility — and the blame — for the prewar intelligence debacle is much broader than described in today’s report.
The latter, which comes by way of an op-ed from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), notes the problem the Senate report, shaped by Bush’s Republican allies, chose to ignore: that White House officials and neo-cons at the Pentagon bear the burden of responsibility.
They should have been more diligent in challenging the validity of analytical assumptions and the adequacy of intelligence collection and reporting related to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war. Instead, those analyses that conformed with pro-war views were routinely accepted and reports that did not conform to the pro-war model were largely ignored.
I’ve never really understood how the Republicans could make the CIA the ultimate scapegoat for faulty Iraq intelligence anyway. When the White House couldn’t get the information it wanted from the CIA, it turned to the Office of Special Plans, the agency the Pentagon created to give the administration what it was looking for to justify a war with Iraq.
As Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel who served in the Pentagon and observed “first-hand” how the OSP manipulated intelligence for the White House, reported earlier this year:
From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it.
I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.
I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.
While this commandeering of a narrow segment of both intelligence production and American foreign policy matched closely with the well-published desires of the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike, felt that this agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been openly presented to the American people. Instead, the public story line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses, and a war one year later Americans do not really understand.