I read the Senate Intelligence Committee's 30-page summary of its much lengthier report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq this weekend. It's a sober, yet scathing, indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The senate committee concludes that U.S. intelligence, particularly the CIA, overstated or misled in making the case that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical weapons, a more advanced biological weapons program than prior to the Gulf War, and reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. It also found "no evidence that the [intelligence community's] mischaracterization or exaggeration of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities was the result of political pressure."
The report gives the reader a few disturbing impressions. First, the CIA is overrun by analysts to the exclusion of collectors of actual intelligence. For instance, the report notes: "The Intelligence Community did not have a single [human intelligence] source collecting against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq after 1998." Second, these days there is nothing "Central" about the Central Intelligence Agency. The senators repeatedly demonstrate how the CIA excluded contradictory information from other U.S. intelligence gathering outfits when presenting information to lawmakers and shielded its own intelligence data from other intelligence agencies. Third, "The Intelligence Community suffered from a collective presumption that Iraq had an active and growing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. This 'group think' dynamic led Intelligence Community analysts, collectors and managers to both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programs."
The senators report a number of other disturbing conclusions:
* Secretary Powell's speech to the UN contained information cleared by the CIA that was "overstated, misleading, or incorrect."
* "CURVE BALL," the "principle source behind the Intelligence Community's assessments that Iraq had a mobile biological weapons program," was someone American intelligence didn't have access to.
* American intelligence "left itself open to possible manipulation by foreign governments and other parties interested in influencing U.S. policy."
Words like "misrepresented," "incorrect," "overstated," "not supported by the intelligence," "not substantiated," "inconsistent," and "misleading" copiously appear throughout the report to describe the CIA's presentation of pre-war intelligence.
With intelligence failure characterizing much of the last decade--bombing the Sudanese medicine factory, 9/11, and Iraqi WMD--this report is a wake-up call to the intelligence community to get its act together. The alternative, as we've seen with the African embassy bombings, the USS Cole, the Khobar Towers, 9/11, and the Iraq war, is simply too deadly.
Well, hindsight is always 20/20... so where was the Senate Intelligence Committee that had oversight over the CIA prior to 9/11? It's great to point fingers now, but it was their JOB to make sure that the CIA didn't continually bungle intelligence.
Personally, I think the Senate Oversight Committee failed totally by allowing the Clinton Administration to continually dismantle intel operations. Too bad guys like Sen. Rockefeller (D)still don't get it.
