Below is an example of the Repub current party line, "It was an intelligence failure". Their problem is to "walk the fine line" between blaming the intelligence community, and not allowing an independent commission (as called for by Kay and McCain, among others). So for the current CYA, read on...
2 congressional panels echo Kay on Iraqi weaponry
The House and Senate intelligence committees have unearthed a series of failures in the prewar intelligence on Iraq similar to those identified by former weapons inspector David Kay, leading them to believe that CIA analysts and their superiors did not seriously consider the possibility that Saddam Hussein no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction, according to congressional officials.
The committees, working separately for the past seven months, have determined that the CIA relied too heavily on circumstantial, outdated intelligence and became overly dependent on satellite and spy-plane imagery and communications intercepts.
Like Kay, the committees have found that CIA operatives and analysts failed to detect that Iraq's chain of command for developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons had fallen apart, and that Iraqi scientists and others were engaged in their own campaign to deceive Hussein, telling him they had weapons that didn't exist.
"It was like a runaway train," said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., referring to the CIA's assessment of Iraq's weapons program. "Once it left the station, it kept going faster and faster. Some analysts may have been trying to slow it down, but it just kept going."
The White House, meanwhile, edged closer Thursday to acknowledging that there were flaws in the intelligence about Iraq, but continued to say it was not yet possible to draw final conclusions about Iraq's weapons. On CBS-TV's "Early Show," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said, "What we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground."
But, she added, "that's not surprising in a country that was as closed and secretive as Iraq, a country that was doing everything that it could to deceive the United Nations, to deceive the world."
In Senate testimony Wednesday, Kay said his months of searching in Iraq convinced him that Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction immediately before the war, and he called for an independent inquiry into why U.S. intelligence agencies were off the mark.
The statements reignited a fiercely partisan debate about the performance of the CIA and over whether the Bush administration twisted the intelligence, as some Democrats contend, as it built a case for war. Administration officials said Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that posed a grave threat to the United States.
That deep partisan split has also riven the two intelligence committees, and staff members fear that party-line battling will make it impossible for Congress to provide a cogent analysis of the issues or answers to the U.S. public.
"Bipartisanship has become the hardest" to achieve "since I've been on the committee, and I'm very, very sad about it," said Rep. Jane Harman, D- Rancho Palos Verdes (Los Angeles County), the top-ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee. "This is a serious change. If these intelligence committees can't do it, no one can do it."
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher on Thursday said of the reliability of prewar intelligence, "Certainly, some of the elements we know are subject to debate, disagreement. But until we know what the real full extent of the program was, you don't have anything to compare what the intelligence was at the time to what the final answers are."
Roberts called the prewar estimates of Iraq's capabilities "a world intelligence failure. There wasn't any real attempt to follow up, by any intelligence service, to do the kind of things you should do to determine if it was true," he said. "They took it on faith."
"They just kept turning the page," said Rep. Porter Goss of Florida, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "If it was true yesterday, it must be true today. Did the analysts fumble? I don't think so. They just didn't have enough pieces of the puzzle."
sfgate.com
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