WASHINGTON, 25 October 2003 — The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is preparing a highly critical report faulting CIA Director George Tenet, among others, for overstating the prewar weapons and terrorism evidence against Iraq, the Washington Post said yesterday.
The report will follow criticism last month from lawmakers in the House of Representatives who charged the intelligence agency with “significant deficiencies” in collecting information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs and alleged ties to Al-Qaeda.
The United States justified going to war against Iraq largely because of a supposed threat from Iraq’s biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs, but no such weapons have been found.
The top Democrat on the committee, however, said the report was far from finished.
“We still have a lot of work to do before we can make any judgments about the accuracy of our prewar intelligence and we must continue to review how that intelligence was used by administration policy makers,” West Virginia Sen. John Rockefeller said in a statement earlier in the week.
Democrats hoping to take President George W. Bush’s place after next year’s elections have seized on the issue of whether his administration pumped up the case for war, as well as his handling of the conflict and its aftermath.
Members of the Senate committee’s staff were surprised by the amount of circumstantial evidence and single-source or disputed information used to write intelligence documents summarizing Iraq’s capabilities, the Post said, citing Republican and Democratic sources.
Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, told the Post “the executive was ill-served by the intelligence community,” adding that the information was sometimes “sloppy” and inconclusive.
