The principal claims justifying the invasion of Iraq – that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons and was developing nuclear weapons – were fundamentally wrong and the result of a ”global intelligence failure”, a Senate investigation concluded on Friday.
”We went into Iraq based on false claims,” said Senator Jay Rockefeller, one of the authors of Friday’s report on the debacle, said. He added that he now regretted his vote in October 2002 to support the war.
”The fact is that the administration, at all levels … used bad information to bolster its case for war, and we in Congress would not have authorised that war … if we knew what we know now,” Rockefeller said.
Pat Roberts, the Republican chairperson of the Senate intelligence committee, insisted the war was still justified on humanitarian grounds, to liberate the Iraqi people. He also argued that the intelligence failure was not solely the fault of the CIA.
”While we did not specifically address it in our report, it is clear that this group-think also extended to our allies and to the United Nations and several other nations as well, all of whom did believe the Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs,” Roberts said. ”This was a global intelligence failure.”
The report found that US intelligence relied too much ”on foreign government services and third-party reporting, thereby increasing the potential for manipulation of US policy by foreign interests”.
However, the Senate report placed most of the blame on the CIA, which it faulted for a total lack of spies in Iraq, and a tendency to cling to the conventional wisdom, or ”groupthink”, about Saddam’s weapons programme.
In a stinging indictment of the outgoing CIA director, George Tenet, the report found the agency suffered from ”a broken corporate culture and poor management”.
”Leading up to September 11, our government didn’t connect the dots. In Iraq, we are even more culpable because the dots themselves never existed,” Mr Rockefeller said.
While Republicans and Democrats on the intelligence committee agreed on the depth of the problems affecting the CIA and on the need for reform, they differed on the role of the administration.
The published report largely absolves the Bush White House from blame, but Democrats issued dissenting statements, accusing senior officials of putting pressure on CIA analysts to come up with assessments to support a war. The Republicans insisted any study of the administration role should be left until a ”second phase” that is unlikely to be completed before the November elections.
”As a result,” Mr Rockefeller said, ”the committee’s report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq when the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions publicly.”
The committee’s Republicans, however, insisted that there was no evidence that CIA analysts changed their assessments as a result of political pressure – a finding that was reflected in the final report.
Rockefeller said he and other Democrats signed the report despite misgivings because he agreed with the bulk of its findings, which painted a dismal picture of the CIA.
The report found CIA analysts had been right to be sceptical over reports of a link between Baghdad and al-Qaeda. That scepticism however, was not reflected in the claims made by senior White House officials, particularly vice-president Dick Cheney.
Examination of that discrepancy, as with everything else dealing with the administration’s role, was put off until ”phase two”.
Downing Street refused to comment on the findings because of the imminence of the Butler report, due next week. – Guardian Unlimited Â