U.S. Senate panel accuses Bush of Iraq exaggerations

By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane
International Heral Tribune
Friday, June 6, 2008

WASHINGTON: A long-delayed Senate report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans has concluded that President George W. Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq's weapons programs and Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda.

The report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it marks the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Bush and other officials, is the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policymakers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by available intelligence.

The 170-page report accuses Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

In a statement accompanying the report, Senator John Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said: "The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein."

Dana Perino, the White House spokesman, on Thursday called the report a "selective view," and said the Bush administration's public statements were based on the same faulty intelligence given to Congress and endorsed by foreign intelligence services. Senator Christopher Bond of Missouri, the committee's top Republican, called the report a "waste of committee time and resources."

The report on the prewar statements about Iraq found that on some key issues most notably Iraq's purported nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs the public statements from Bush, Cheney and other senior officials were generally "substantiated" by the best estimates at the time from American intelligence agencies. But the report found that the administration officials' statements usually did not reflect the intelligences agencies' uncertainties about the evidence or disputes among them.

In a separate report, the Intelligence Committee provided new details about a series of clandestine meetings in Rome and Paris between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the government in Tehran, and they were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about internal rivalries inside of Iran and suspected Iranian "hit" team targeting American troops in Afghanistan.

The report concludes that Stephen Hadley, now the national security adviser, and Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary, "acted within their authorities" to dispatch the Pentagon officials to Rome. At the same time, the report criticized the meetings as ill-advised and accused Hadley and Wolfowitz of keeping the State Department and intelligence agencies in the dark about the meetings, which it portrayed as part of a rogue intelligence operation.
The two reports were the final parts of the committee's so-called "phase two" investigation of prewar intelligence on Iraq and related issues. The first phase of the inquiry, begun in the summer of 2003 and completed in July 2004, identified grave faults in the Central Intelligence Agency's analysis of the threat posed by Saddam.

The report was especially critical of statements by Bush and Cheney that linked Iraq to Al Qaeda and raised the possibility that Saddam might supply the terrorist group with weapons of mass destruction. "Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises," Rockefeller wrote.

Bond and four other Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from the report's findings and suggested the investigation was a partisan smokescreen to obscure the real story: that Central Intelligence Agency failed the Bush administration by delivering intelligence assessments to policymakers that have since been discredited.

In a detailed minority report, four of those Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy and their own campaign of cherry-picking — namely, refusing to include misleading public statements by such top Democrats as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Rockefeller.

As an example, they pointed to an October 2002 speech by Rockefeller, who declared to his Senate colleagues that he had arrived at the "inescapable conclusion that the threat posed to America by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is so serious that despite the risks, and we should not minimize the risks, we must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with the threat."

The report about the Bush administration's public statements does shed some new detail about the intelligence information available to policymakers as they built a case for war. In September 2002, for instance, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "the Iraq problem cannot be solved by airstrikes alone" because Iraqi chemical and biological weapons were so deeply buried that they could not be penetrated by American bombs.

Two months later, however, the National Intelligence Council wrote an assessment for Rumsfeld concluding that the Iraqi underground weapons facilities identified by the intelligence agencies "are vulnerable to conventional, precision-guided, penetrating munitions because they are not deeply buried."

On Thursday, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democratic member of the Intelligence Committee, said Congress was never told about the National Intelligence Council assessment.

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