U.S. Senate report cites intelligence flaws in lead up to Iraq war
By Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti
Thursday, June 5, 2008
WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush and his aides built a public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and ignoring disagreements among spy agencies over Iraq's weapons programs and Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda, according to a Senate report long delayed by partisan squabbling.
The report accuses Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the months before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and playing on American fears in emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein," said Senator John Rockefeller 4th, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a statement accompanying his committee's 171-page report.
At the same time, the report found that on several key issues, including Iraq's alleged nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, public statements from Bush, Cheney and other senior officials were generally "substantiated" by the best estimates of American spy agencies. But the report, which was endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, found that these public statements often did not reflect the agencies' uncertainty about the evidence.
In a separate report released Wednesday, the intelligence committee provided new details about a series of clandestine meetings in Paris and Rome between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the regime in Tehran, and were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about internal rivalries inside Iran and alleged Iranian "hit" teams targeting American troops in Afghanistan.
The report concludes that Steven Hadley, now the national security adviser, and Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary, "acted within their authorities" to dispatch the Pentagon officials to Rome. At the same time, the report paints the meetings as a rogue intelligence-gathering operation and accuses Hadley and Wolfowitz of keeping the State Department and intelligence agencies in the dark about the meetings.
Some Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from some of its findings and attached a detailed minority report that listed prewar statements by Rockefeller and other Democrats describing the threat posed by Iraq.
"The report released today was a waste of committee time and resources that should have been spent overseeing the intelligence community," said the minority report, signed by Senator Christopher Bond of Missouri, the committee's top Republican, and three Republican colleagues.
They also accused Democrats of hypocrisy; namely, refusing to include misleading public statements by top Democrats like Rockefeller and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
As an example, they pointed to an Oct. 2002 speech by Rockefeller, in which he said he had arrived at the "inescapable conclusion that the threat posed to America by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is so serious that despite the risks, and we should not minimize the risks, we must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with the threat."
The two reports are the final parts of the committee's so-called "phase two" investigation of prewar intelligence on Iraq and related issues. The first phase of the inquiry, completed in July 2004, identified grave faults in the intelligence agencies' collection and analysis of the threat posed by Saddam.
In order to complete that initial 2004 report, committee members agreed to put off several of the more politically volatile topics. Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who was then chairman, nonetheless declared nearly four years ago that the phase two effort was "a priority. I made my commitment and it will get done."
But a lengthy standoff ensued. Democrats accused Republicans of dodging their demands to complete the inquiry in order to protect the Bush administration from damaging revelations. Republican insisted that they were not dragging their feet and asserted that the findings might well turn out to embarrass congressional Democrats.
In September 2006, the committee issued reports on two parts of the phase two study, one on how prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs and links to terrorism compared with postwar findings and another on the intelligence agencies' use of information from the Iraqi National Congress, the controversial opposition group to Saddam.
In May 2007, the committee, now led by Democrats, put out a third part of the review, this one examining prewar predictions by the intelligence agencies about postwar Iraq.
But it would take another year to complete the most delicate part of the planned inquiry, the look at prewar public statements by executive branch officials. In the end, the Republicans chose to issue their own dissenting report, aimed at showing that some Democrats who have been eager to attack the administration had themselves made bellicose comments about Saddam and the threat he posed.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, once seen as a relative refuge from the political maneuvering and brawling that characterizes many other committees, has been mired in partisan dispute for most of the last five years. The reports made public Thursday and the polarized comments accompanying them are unlikely to improve relations between Rockefeller and Bond and their party colleagues on the committee. |
