[Al Jazeera] U.S. presidential panel slams CIA over Iraq’s intelligence

U.S. presidential panel slams CIA over Iraq’s intelligence
3/29/2005 7:00:00 PM GMT

The final report of a presidential commission studying U.S. intelligence failures on Iraq’s arms states that the CIA missed and misinterpreted key information, and that it didn’t consider the possibility that Saddam Hussein had given up stockpiles of illegal weapons before the 2003 invasion.

The report, to be presented to the White House on Thursday, also criticized the CIA and other U.S. spy agencies for failing to properly assess Saddam Hussein’s maneuvers, the New York Times said Tuesday.

The Times also said that the report dismissed the conclusion that Saddam’s fleet of “unmanned aerial vehicles," and "mobile vehicles" posed a major threat; claims repeated by the U.S. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top U.S. officials ahead of the war.

The mission of the panel was to study the spy agencies’ ability to "collect, process, analyze and disseminate information concerning the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign powers."

In drafting their report, the nine-member commission held formal meetings with Bush and senior White House officials, as well as top administration intelligence and foreign policy officials. It also interviewed former CIA directors and academic experts on weapons proliferation.

"A hearty condemnation"

The report singles out former CIA director George Tenet for particular criticism. It also includes what one top U.S. official called "a hearty condemnation" of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, two of the biggest intelligence organizations.

Moreover, the panel recommends major reforms in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that goes beyond the legislation adopted by Congress late last year, which set up a central director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 agencies.

The unclassified version of the report, more than 400 pages long, doesn’t detail the holes in the U.S. intelligence about North Korea and Iran. Most of these issues are included in a much longer classified version, which is highly critical of U.S. failures to penetrate Iran’s nuclear program.

Officials who read the unclassified report said that it makes a "case study" of the national intelligence on Iraq, the largest assessment of the country’s intelligence that officials compiled at the White House's request in just a few weeks in 2002.

The findings of the commission, if made public, will fuel the arguments now heard in China, South Korea and Europe that an intelligence system that failed in Iraq cannot be trusted when it comes to the evaluation of how much progress was made by North Korea and Iran in the weapons field.