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US intelligence 'dead wrong' on Iraq - Report
WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence on Iraq was "dead wrong," dealing a blow to American credibility that will take years to undo, and spymasters still know disturbingly little about nuclear programs in countries like Iran and North Korea, a presidential commission reported on Thursday. The commission's bluntly written report, based on more than a year of investigations, offered a damning assessment of the intelligence that President Bush used to launch the Iraq war two years ago and warned that flaws are "still all too common" throughout spy agencies.
At a time when the United States is accusing Iran of nuclear ambitions and pressuring North Korea on its nuclear programs, the report said: "Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors." The commission called for a broad overhaul in the intelligence community to increase sharing among 15 agencies and foster dissenting views. The panel, appointed in response to intelligence failures in Iraq, was led by appeals court judge Laurence Silberman and former Virginia Democratic Sen. Charles Robb. The U.S. intelligence community was mired in a Cold War-mindset, Robb told a news conference. "They're still, in some respects, fighting the last war," he said. Bush said he agreed that fundamental change is needed and vowed to "correct what needs to be fixed." He directed White House homeland security adviser Fran Townsend to lead a review of the findings over 90 days and oversee corrections. "Our collection and analysis of intelligence will never be perfect, but in an age where our margin for error is getting smaller, in an age in which we are at war, the consequences of underestimating a threat could be tens of thousands of innocent lives," Bush said. Democrats said previous calls for intelligence reform have not borne fruit and hoped this one will. "It concerns me that many of the commission's recommendations have been made before, but the president failed to act," said Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden (news, bio, voting record), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The report warned that John Negroponte, nominated to be the new director of national intelligence, faces turf battles with the CIA and Defense Department, which it called some of the government's "most headstrong agencies," and predicted "they will try to run around -- or over" him. CIA director Porter Goss vowed to work with Negroponte to quickly make needed changes. "We need more robust collection and rigorous analysis," he said. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, accused by critics of hyping the intelligence on Iraq to pursue a costly war with a deadly aftermath, escaped direct blame. "The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments," the report said. But the report added: "It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom." Robb said the commission opened a confidential line to invite allegations of political pressure and to date had received none that panned out. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada urged the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate whether Bush administration officials misused intelligence.
NORTH KOREA, IRAN INTELLIGENCE PROBLEMS A chapter in the report on alleged nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea was classified and not released publicly. Robb said only that there were "systemic" problems with intelligence on those two countries. Sources familiar with that section said it was among the most critical, finding U.S. intelligence on Iran's nuclear program particularly inadequate. The 600-page report sharply criticized the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and other agencies for producing "worthless or misleading" intelligence on Iraq before a war fought over claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, none of which was found. In what amounted to a direct assault on George Tenet, who was CIA director before the Iraq war and gave the president his daily intelligence briefing, the commission found that "the daily reports sent to the president and senior policymakers discussing Iraq over many months proved to be disastrously one-sided." Tenet said in his defense that "American intelligence was nearly in (a) Chapter 11" bankruptcy by the mid-to-late 1990s, and that he had implemented a rebuilding program that was still in progress as the Iraq threat was examined. The commission recommended the creation of a national counter-proliferation center to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction and a separate National Security Service within the FBI. |
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