posted July 8, 2004, updated 12:45 p.m.
Damaging reports finger CIA and MI6
US and British spy chiefs to face calls for structural reform due to Iraq failures.
by Jim Bencivenga | csmonitor.com
The imminent release of two highly critical reports on US and British prewar intelligence leading up to the Iraq war draw conclusions that will have "Spy chiefs facing accusations of 'worldwide intelligence failures' over the case for war in Iraq," reports the online news site ThisisLondon.
The findings are the most damaging attack yet on the intelligence used to justify the war and will be a blow for President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair.
But the impact of the findings will do more than fix or exonerate official blame.
"These conclusions literally beg for changes in the intelligence community," ThisisLondon quotes US Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chair of the US Senate intelligence committee. "What we had was a worldwide intelligence failure," says Roberts.
The report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will be issued Friday, July 9. Its conclusion: the CIA botched the prewar intelligence, reports USA Today.
Sen. Richard Durbin, (D)of Illinois, who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, "The report is tough, direct and totally fair. It was approved with a unanimous bipartisan vote of the committee. I think the CIA is worried about the harsh reality of this report," reports the Palm Beach Post
The "Lord Butler" report, an official inquiry by former British cabinet secretary Lord Frederick Butler, goes public on July 14. It reports a wide range of concerns about intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, reports the Financial Times.
The MI6 intelligence inquiry is expected to assert, with British understatement, that "the intelligence to substantiate the claim was of insufficient quality, and that the intelligence material gathered on Iraq was generally inadequate," reports the Financial Times.
Speaking on BBC TV, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's representative to the UN in the runup to the Iraq war last year, said: "There's no doubt that the stockpiles that we feared might be there are not there," reports the Taipei Times. The prime minister's decision to go to war was "understandable" the Times quotes Greenstock as saying, because the intelligence about Iraq's banned weapons was "compelling:"
It's only, again with hindsight, when we saw that probably the Iraqis were cheating Saddam as well as misleading us, that the evidence is just not there. But the reason for doing this, through the UN resolutions and from intelligence assessments, were actually quite compelling. We were wrong on the stockpiles, we were right about the intention.
Lord Butler is expected to "comment sharply" on the way that John Scarlett, chairman of Whitehall's joint intelligence committee (JIC) interpreted secret information supplied by MI6, says the Times.
A similar charge will accompany the US Senate's intelligence findings, reports the New York Times.
'How the administration used the intelligence was very troubling,' Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview this week. 'They took a flawed set of intelligence reports and converted it into a rationale for going to war.'
Among Lord Butler's other areas of investigation was the issue of whether Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger. "People with knowledge of the report said Lord Butler has concluded that this claim was reasonable and consistent with the intelligence," reports the Financial Times.
President George W. Bush referred to the Niger claim in his state of the union address last year. But officials were forced into a climbdown when it was revealed that the only primary intelligence material the US possessed were documents later shown to be forgeries. The Bush administration has since distanced itself from all suggestions that Iraq sought to buy uranium. The UK government has remained adamant that negotiations over sales did take place and that the fake documents were not part of the intelligence material it had gathered to underpin its claim.
The inevitable "personal politics" stemming from each of these reports, especially in a presidential election year is not likely to sway the bigger point that structural change is needed at the CIA, reports USA Today.
The Senate report lays much of the blame on the CIA's failure to develop human spying networks in Iraq, where electronic espionage could never penetrate. It portrays the CIA as inept against terrorists and the nations that support them.... The report echoes a recent House Intelligence Committee analysis that concludes the CIA has ignored its chief mission of gathering human intelligence in favor of high-tech surveillance. The CIA is heading "over a proverbial cliff" after years of mismanagement, the House report said.
On or around July 26, an independent panel probing the intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks will report its findings, which also are sure to be highly critical of the CIA, says USA Today.
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