A United States Senate report due to be published on Friday will blame the CIA for the Bush administration’s unfounded claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and will not address White House responsibility for the debacle.
The report by the Senate intelligence committee will admonish the outgoing director, George Tenet, and CIA analysts who, one Republican senator claimed on Thursday, had made ”wholesale mistakes” in their collection and processing of intelligence.
Saxby Chambliss said flawed assessments were passed to Tenet and found their way into the official National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002, which accused Saddam Hussein of stockpiling chemical and biological arms, while developing nuclear ones.
”There were a number of situations where unreasonable conclusions were reached,” Chambliss told the Knight Ridder news agency.
”Some of it related to the information itself. The information was faulty… I would say it’s a total vindication of any allegations that might ever have been made about what the administration did with the information.”
But critics of the administration have already dismissed the report as a whitewash, and have accused senior officials, particularly the vice-president, Dick Cheney, of putting CIA analysts under pressure to produce harsher assessments of Iraq’s weapons capability.
Democrats have accused the Bush administration of stage-managing recent leaks highlighting the CIA’s shortcomings as a means of diverting attention from the White House’s use of that intelligence.
The conclusions of Friday’s reports are the result of a compromise between the majority Republicans on the committee, who did not want to address the White House role at all, and Democrats, who demanded scrutiny of political interference in the CIA’s work.
The two sides agreed to postpone that examination until a further study, which is unlikely to be published before the elections in November.
Meanwhile, the blame will be shouldered by the CIA and Tenet, who held his farewell party on Thursday. Tenet assured George Bush that the evidence for WMD was a ”slam-dunk case” according to Plan of Attack, a book on the decision to go to war by the journalist Bob Woodward.
Democrats on the committee have disagreed with the assessment that the analysts were to blame. They plan to sign the report but made dissenting remarks on Friday.
Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations in the CIA’s counter-terrorist unit, said Chambliss’s conclusion was not supported by the facts. ”People would have to forget an awful lot of history to make that wash. It ignores the fact that [the Bush administration] had already taken a strategic decision to go to war, before they asked for the intelligence.” he said.
He said repeated questioning of reports downplaying Iraq’s arsenal and links with al-Qaeda by Cheney and other senior officials led to an atmosphere in which the CIA leadership and analysts ”bent over backwards” to find evidence that conformed to the administration’s views.
Cannistraro said the root of the intelligence fiasco lay in the CIA’s lack of spies inside Iraq and its reliance on exiles and defectors, one of whom was later denounced by the CIA as an Iranian agent.
The US homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge, yesterday said that al-Qaeda was planning a ”large-scale” attack aimed at disrupting the US elections but offered no details. – Guardian Unlimited Â