United States spy agencies were ”dead wrong” in ”almost all” of their pre-war judgements about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capability, a commission appointed by the US president said in a final report on Thursday.
The damning report describes the failures as ”major” and reveals that US intelligence still knows ”disturbingly little” about the weapons programmes in other potentially dangerous nations.
An unclassified version of the report, released to the public by the White House, does not go into significant detail on the US intelligence community’s abilities in Iran and North Korea, but those details are understood to be included in a classified version.
The report says: ”Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programmes of many of the world’s most dangerous actors … in some cases it knows less now than it did five or 10 years ago.”
There is also a disclosure about al-Qaeda. The commission said the US spy network has been surprised by the terrorist group’s advances in biological weapons, particularly a virulent strain of a disease that the report keeps secret, identifying it only as ”Agent X”.
The commission was formed a year ago by President George Bush to investigate intelligence failures in Iraq. Both the Bush administration and Britain’s Downing Street claimed Saddam Hussein had hidden large stockpiles of WMD as a prime justification for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the aftermath of the invasion, no WMD were found.
Analysts said Thursday’s report implicitly absolves the Bush administration of manipulating the intelligence used to launch the invasion, putting the blame for bad intelligence directly on the intelligence community.
”The daily intelligence briefings given to you [Mr Bush] before the Iraq war were flawed,” it says. ”Through attention-grabbing headlines and repetition of questionable data, these briefings overstated the case that Iraq was rebuilding its WMD [capacity].”
The report calls for ”dramatic change” to prevent any repeat of the mistakes made over Iraq and outlines 74 recommendations.
But the report also warns that many insiders admitted to the commission that the intelligence world has ”an almost perfect record of resisting external recommendations”.
At a news conference, Bush thanked the commission for its ”important report”, which he said will help the hard-working intelligence community carry out its critical and extremely difficult work in a ”better fashion”.
He said many of the successes of the intelligence services have to be kept secret but acknowledged that ”America needs to know more about the weapons programmes of its most dangerous adversaries”.
A White House spokesperson said Bush will set up a process to review each recommendation and act ”in a fairly quick period of time”.
The report says Bush should give John Negroponte — the new director of US national intelligence, who has yet to take up the post — broader powers for overseeing the nation’s 15 spy agencies. Boosting his powers will allow him to deal with any challenges to his authority from the CIA, Defence Department or other agencies.
The commission also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine the bureau’s counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence resources into a new office.
The main cause for the Iraq intelligence failure, the commission said, was the intelligence community’s ”inability to collect good information about Iraq’s WMD programmes, serious errors in analysing 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”.
The report says: ”On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude.”
What is needed is 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”, the report says.
Bush received the report in a meeting with commission members in the Cabinet room in the White House.
Representative Ike Skelton, a senior Democrat on the House armed services committee, said the failures are widespread.
”I don’t think you can blame any one person, although the buck does stop at the top of every one of these agencies … the fault is spread out across all the agencies.” — Guardian Unlimited Â