Posted on 07/09/2004 11:45:16 AM PDT by Sister_T
WASHINGTON - The key U.S. assertions leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq (news - web sites) — that Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons — were wrong and based on false or overstated CIA (news - web sites) 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, the bipartisan report concluded. 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.
The report did not address a key allegation by Democrats: That Bush and other officials further twisted the evidence to back their calls for war against Iraq. The committee's top Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said he was disappointed the panel did not look into what he called "exaggerated" claims of the Iraqi threat by top administration officials.
President Bush (news - web sites) called it a "useful report" about where the intelligence community "went short."
"We need to know. I want to know. I want to know how to make the agencies better," he said at a political stop Friday in Kutztown, Pa.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the report showed that some material Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) used to try to induce the United Nations (news - web sites) to support war with Iraq was flawed.
But, Boucher said, "The basic case was a correct one. Iraq wanted weapons of mass destruction." He said there was no reason for Powell to apologize for his U.N. presentation.
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."
Rockefeller said: "Tragically, the intelligence failures set forth in this report will affect our national security for generations to come. 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."
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. It faulted Tenet for not personally reviewing Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, which contained since-discredited references to Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium in Africa.
Tenet has resigned and leaves office Sunday.
Bush has been agonizing over whether he will nominate a successor for Tenet before the November election. Poised to take over next week as acting director is Tenet's his deputy, John McLaughlin.
Asked earlier this week whether he planned to wait until after the election to name Tenet's replacement, the president said: "I haven't made up my mind on the nomination process."
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 program. Instead, investigations after the Iraq invasion have shown that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons program and no biological weapons, and only small amounts of chemical weapons have 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 program as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programs," the report concluded.
Such assumptions also led analysts to inflate snippets of questionable information into broad declarations that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, the report said.
For example, speculation that the presence of one specialized truck could mean an effort to transfer chemical weapons was puffed up into a conclusion that Iraq was actively making chemical weapons, the report said.
Analysts also concluded that Iraq had a mobile biological weapons program based mainly on the since-discredited claims of one Iraqi defector code-named "Curve Ball," it said. American agents did not have direct access to Curve Ball or his debriefers, but the source's information was expanded into the conclusion that Iraq had an advanced and active biological weapons program, the report said.
I think this report is full of it and doesn't really matter. Everyone knows Saddam was feeding terrorism and trying to strike a major blow to the US. As for WMD's, I still say he had them. I also think France, Germany, Russia and China were in the middle of it cutting weapons deals throughout the region. This report seems to ignore a lot of facts.
I guess we can plan on seeing the RINO Roberts on the Sunday Yak Shows.
Evidently, it is lost on the the Senator that the muslim world hated and resented us well before we invaded Iraq.
Pinhead.
muslims will never betray islam.
I still think he had WMDs.
We could never prove conclusively whether he had them or not. It isn't hard to hide a small vial of biogerms.
the islamic world is all mirror, lies and conspiracies.
Look at the iranian bluff with the reform movement, while they were infact buying just enough time to build their nukes.
Look at pakistan and their recent drive at bombing emptied out caves to keep the west distracted from the coming test of a nuclear capable paki missiles.
Paki and saudi ties to al qaeda. paki proliferation efforts and the iranian nuclear program wold have never been discovered had it not been for kadaffi freaking out after seeing what happened to saddam and spilling the beans on everybody.
Now that we know about the paki and iranian nuclear program and saudi terror ties.
are we just going to sit quiet with this information or are we going to do something to address the situation.
This information is better than iraq.
These Senators are either really stupid or they're lying.
Roberts is the perfect example of something that mid-west voters have to do battle with all thing time....The Moderate RINO.
Kansas is a state full of decent folks....they deserve better than Roberts. He has no problem with screwing his own country well being....in trade for is own political gain.
Sarin and Mustard gas fall into the WMD cat.
I don't care when it was made....they had them.
Soldiers and civilians who would get exposed to Sarin don't really care what the manufacture date said. They care that they got exposed to Sarin.
This is something RINO Roberts should have thought about before he bothered not to mention the dozen's of shells with Mustard and Sarin that were found in Iraq and reported by our Current Weapons Inspector and his team.
All of the recent data were from satillite pictures and people defecting from Saddam. These defectors reinforced what the photos had and our old information. Everything fit. However, we never actually saw the WMDs. Hell, even the Iraqi commanders during the war thought the units on either side of them had chemical weapons but they themselves didn't.
Bottomline for the decision to go to war was we could no long live with the ambiguity of Saddam's WMD capablities in the post 9/11 era.
I remember best TAG TEAMS and FOREIGN OBJECTS and clueless referees.
I think WMDs still exist and have been passed off to another arab player.
Does that mean we set Saddam Insane free? Worse yet will liberals force an apology to Saddam Insane by Bush?
Or can we give them over to Iraq for crimes in his country?
Syria, most likely (anybody remember the truckloads of stuff intercepted in Jordan - coming from Syria - a little while ago? Didn't get much media attention did it?) But there's also plenty of desert to hide stuff in. Rush got it right - the Committee's covering their own butts. They're useful idiots and dangerous fools.
Rockefeller is a worthless leftist. I suppose we should be glad that this idiot committee has finished its work and will now disperse.
saddam had WMD's in the past.
he had lied in the past.
we could never tell for sure, if he had the WMD's or if he didn't.
It isn't hard to hide a small vial of bio germs.
it is also possible that these WMD's could have ended up in the hands of terrorists.
I don't think we will see saddam's WMD's any time in the near future.
I doubt if the terrorists would use them in the near future either
Because you have to realize that these terrorists and western islamic cadres in my opinion work for the same set of islamic govts.
Right now the islamic agenda is to discredit america for iraq to prevent a similar action iran and pakistan.
The WMD's might surface at some time in the future in the hands of terrorists, But only when we are discredited first to address the islamic agenda of today.
The islamic world is a place where conspiracies are ripe and where hates run deep.
There were many factors at play against saddam.
The shiites hated him for waging war against iran. A war that contained iran.
If it hadn't been for saddam's war against iran, iran would have played hell into the west.
You have no idea about shiite hate towards the US.
they led us into iraq to topple saddam, they then played on the WMD issue to prevent similar action against iran.
The shiites used us, but betrayed us when it came to iran.
Other arab leaders also didn't like him, because saddam was an iraqi nationalist, not quite an arab nationalist.
he threatened arab nations as well.the muslims saw saddam as dividing the arab world.
However the same muslims would oppose similar action against islamic WMD states like iran and pakistan or terror states like saudi arabia, because muslims see these countries as the champions of islamic causes with their support to islamic terror movements all over the world.
I went through such a lengthy post to highlight the various factors at play in the islamic world.
We should use these factors to our advantage.
we shouldn't let the muslims use us and then burry us to protect their interests.
We should have first asked the shiites to help us wage war against iran, and addressed iraq afterwards.
this way the shiites wouldnt have got from us what they wanted and then turned their guns on us to save iran.
Instead, we would have got what we wanted first.
The shiites and wahhabi camps are equally dangerous. One includes groups like al qaeda and the other
groups like hizbollah, hamas and islamic jihad.
while jamiati islami, islamists within western intelligence and pakistan bring these two islamic worlds together into a joint crusade against the west.
the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.
Your only true friends are people who believe in your values, your practices and your way of life.
we need to get a western, latino and african majority in our cadres against the islamic world.
even christian arabs can't be trusted. they could still would have loyalties to their arab countries and race.
tareq aziz, saddam's deputy, was a christian arab
I'd say we need to get people like americans, latinos and africans who can blend into the culture, yet have no biases either for or against the region.
We could get the most reliable information from such people.
all those who criticize the iraq war, do so because they weren't in positions of responsibility.
had they been responsible for the consequences of their choices, they wouldn't have come with a decision different to the one that was taken.
In the aftermath of 911, and not knowing for sure, if iraq had or if it didn't have WMD's, most of them would have made the decision to go to war themselves.
Iraq had admitted to quantities of chemical weapons. They never accounted for or offered proof of destruction of those quantities of nerve and blister agent.
Yet these morons on this committee have now raised the bar to unprecedented levels for preemptive strikes on those who would do America harm.
How do such stupid men rise to such levels of power?
In the intelligence world, you can not always have the information that you need.
However you should be extremely war of islamic cadres, since they would have greater loyalties to their religion and countries.
After the defeat of the soviet union, most of the islamic cadres from the afghanistan-pakistan-iran region set their on america as the next super power to be defeated to pave the way for islamic glory, it seems the khoemini loyalists from iran joined the free as well.
the world is far from perfect. the intelligence world is no exception to it.
You just cannot have every information that you need.
You just recruit the right people and try your best.
You still might not always get the information you need.
but that is what life is . It's far from perfect.
we could still improve on the intelligence world by keeping muslims out of decision making, policy matters and handling information.
We would still need islamic moles within islamic govts, but this time they'd have to work for american controllers, who would have no loyalties to islam and who wouldn't settle for any lies.
we would also need a few muslims on the ground for logistics and operational purposes etc, but these teams should have a non muslim majority to prevent the muslims from commandeering the teams away from the task.
the latinos and africans should again be ones who don't see america as an imperial power, but a defender of their way of life and values.
Your cadres should be ideologically aligned with you and those who aren't aligned, should have a majority around them that is aligned.
finally we need to have american translators to know what goes on inside western islamic cadres, so that we don't end up with a mini islamic agency within the western intelligence establishment itself.
Well we should put up a good defense to support our decision to go to war with iraq.
I think we have very strong arguments here.
Saddam had WMD's in the past. We didn't have conclusive proof that he didn't have them any longer and we just couldn't risk a WMD attack against american cities.
most of these members would have made the same choice, had they been in positions, where they would be responsible for their decisions.
We, however shouldnt blame the committee for its work.
it's their job to investigate, while it is ours to defend our actions.
its a democracy and thats the way the system works.
As far as the church comittee is concerned, i don't know much about it, other than a google search.
but i do believe in granting americans all their freedoms and individual liberties.
this country is the land of the free and our liberties set us apart from the rest of the world and make us the greatest country in the world
Since terrorists, aren't americans, foreigners should be subjected to a different set of laws than americans.
Why should we let a bunch of terrorists dictate how americans should lead their lives.
We can defend ourselves from terrorists and yet defend our own liberties by extending the waiting period for american citizenship to say 20 years and then subjecting foreigners to a different set of laws.
that is the only way, we can defend ourselves from americans, yet defend our own liberties as well.
You have to see that it is more than our lives at stakes, the very principles that the US is about.
You can't let a few terrorists change the way we live.
We would have lost the war, if we let them do so.
Subject foreigners to a different set of rules to protect american liberties, i'd say.
The notion that Iraq was WMDless is as stupid a notion as I have heard in years and it has been put forth by a committee of Congress.
You really should read up on the Church Committee and the damage it has done to the American Intel Community.
All in all, I'm glad Bush went into Iraq, and I STILL support our troops and appreciate their efforts and sacrifices.
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