[Al Jazeera] U.S. spy agencies "dead wrong" on Saddams WMDs

U.S. spy agencies "dead wrong" on Saddams WMDs

3/31/2005 2:45:00 PM GMT

A presidential commission released a report on Thursday slamming America's spy agencies for being "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction before the invasion.

"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the commission said in a report to the president. "This was a major intelligence failure."

In its report, the commission also said that main cause of failure was the intelligence community's "inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence.

"On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude," the report said.

The commission urged for a dramatic change to avoid similar failures in the future. It set more than 70 recommendations, and demanded that the U.S. President, George W. Bush give John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, more powers for overseeing the nation's 15 spy agencies.

It also called for major changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office.

"The bad news is that we still know disturbingly little about the weapons programs and even less about the intentions of many of our most dangerous adversaries," the report said.

"Our review has convinced us that the best hope for preventing future failures is dramatic change," the report said. "We need an intelligence community that is truly integrated, far more imaginative and willing to run risks, open to a new generation of Americans and receptive to new technologies."

"It won't be easy to provide this leadership to the intelligence components of the Defense Department or to the CIA," the commissioners said. "They are some of the government's most headstrong agencies. Sooner or later, they will try to run around — or over — the DNI. Then, only your determined backing will convince them that we cannot return to the old ways," the commission said.

The commission released its 600 pages report after more than a year of work that included closed-door sessions with the U.S. president and senior administration officials.

In a classified portion, the report charges U.S. spy agencies of having done a poor job of developing sources to get credible information on the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran.

Numerous intelligence failures have been detailed in several government reports since the Sept. 11 attacks. But this commission is the first formed by the President to study why the U.S. spy agencies concluded that the toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, Washington’s key justifications for invading Iraq in March 2003.

Last year, another commission was formed by the U.S. President and led by Republican Laurence Silberman, a retired federal appeals court judge, and Democrat Charles Robb, a former senator from Virginia, as it became clear that U.S. weapons inspectors were not going to find any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Bush will discuss the report with Cabinet members today, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

"Making sure we have the best possible intelligence is critical to protecting the American people," McClellan said.

Senior intelligence officials have already started to soften the impact of the criticism, with the head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes satellite imagery, telling the employees in an e-mail that they should "take on the lessons learned, and drive on."

"You may find the report difficult to read and you may not agree with the commission's analysis, opinions, or recommendations," retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper said. "I understand that it's much more difficult to be criticized rather than praised in public."

 

Damn Arabs should not be paying such close attention.

 

Does the messenger or the message matter? I suspect the board wingnuts might care, but I am surprised you do.

 

Are you surprised that Al Jazeera is not spinning the press release for their own purposes?

I will fess up. I posted the Al Jazeera article since it was nearly verbatum what is being carried by US mainstream news orgs, without any apparent bias. The lack of bias should surprise some here, me included btw. Al Jazeera has every right to bash the US in their coverage of this issue. They did not. That might indicate their English speaking audience do not need the bias (while their Arab audience does?)

 

non sequitur

 

Calling John Edwards ...

 

him too

 

My primary news source is:

http://news.google.com/nwshp?gl=us&ned=us&topic=n

 

I think I have cited them three times so far. I have probably sited NYT more often. As more for the reason I cited them recently, I mentioned that above.