WASHINGTON, 1 April 2005 — A presidential commission released a critical report yesterday saying America’s spy agencies were “dead wrong” in most of their judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before the war and, that the US knows “disturbingly little” about the weapons programs and threats posed in other potentially dangerous nations, including North Korea. The commission’s report said the harm done to American credibility “will take years to undo.”
But both Bush and his inner circle — accused of hyping the intelligence on Iraq in order to pursue a costly war with a deadly aftermath — escaped direct blame.
George Tenet, former CIA director prior to the Iraq war who gave the president his daily intelligence briefing, was not so fortunate. “The daily briefings sent to the president and senior policymakers discussing Iraq…proved to be disastrously one-sided,” it said.
The panel met yesterday with President Bush to formally present its report. It called for sweeping intelligence changes to prevent future failures and advised the Federal Bureau of Investigation to combine its counter terrorism and counterintelligence resources.
The 600-page report sharply criticized the intelligence gathering on Iraq by the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and other agencies. It listed more than 70 recommendations, and said Bush must give John Negroponte, nominated to the new post of Director of National Intelligence, broader powers to oversee the 15 US spy agencies.
“We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” said a letter from the commission to President Bush. “This was a major intelligence failure.”
The nine-member panel was formed by Bush a year ago to examine why US spy agencies mistakenly concluded that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, one of the administration’s main justifications for invading the country.
The main cause, the commission said, was the intelligence community’s “inability to collect good information about Iraq’s WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence. “On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude,” the report said. The commission warned that flaws in the intelligence community’s performance before the war “are still all too common.”
On Al-Qaeda, the commission said it had progressed much further toward developing a biological weapon before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks than the US realized. The discovery of Al-Qaeda’s work came only after the US-led war in Afghanistan removed the Taleban from power, the report said.
The report was led by Laurence H. Silberman, a retired federal judge, and Charles S. Robb, a former Democratic governor and senator from Virginia.
Also yesterday, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell said he is “furious and angry” about being misinformed over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and criticized President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for their clumsy rhetoric in the lead-up to the war.
In a candid magazine interview, Powell, 68, told Germany’s Stern magazine that before appearing at the UN he had spent four days with the Central Intelligence Agency inspecting every photograph and word.
“The CIA believed there were weapons of mass destruction,” Powell said. “The president believed it. I believed it.”
Powell also extended his criticism to Rumsfeld, saying his derogatory rhetoric “contributed to pitting European public opinion against us”.
