By Greg Miller and Mary Curtius
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
July 10, 2004
WASHINGTON — The United States went to war with Iraq on the basis of
flawed intelligence assessments that "either overstated or were not supported
by" the underlying evidence on Baghdad's weapons programs, according to a
scathing report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday.
The report documented sweeping and systemic failures at the CIA and other
U.S. intelligence agencies that led to erroneous conclusions that Iraq had
stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its efforts
to build a nuclear bomb.
CIA analysts suffered a case of groupthink
that rendered them incapable of considering that Iraq might have dismantled its
weapons programs, the report said. Ambiguous intelligence intercepts and
satellite photos were treated as compelling evidence of illicit activity.
Unable to recruit its own spies in Iraq, the CIA came to depend on dubious
accounts from defectors and questionable information from foreign intelligence
services. And information that didn't fit the agency's preconceived notions
about Iraq was simply discarded.
The report amounted to such an
indictment of prewar intelligence that lawmakers from both parties questioned
whether the invasion would have occurred if information on Iraq's weapons
programs had been accurate. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee and an ally of the Bush administration,
acknowledged that Congress might not have authorized the use of force had it
been given correct information.
"I think the world is a safer place
without Saddam Hussein," Roberts said. But at a minimum, without intelligence
indicating Iraq had stockpiles of banned weapons, he said, "I think the war
would have been different."
Rather than a full-scale invasion, Roberts
said, "it would have been on a comparison to, say, Bosnia and Kosovo," where the
United States opted to conduct only an air campaign and didn't engage in ground
battles or occupation.
As in Kosovo, Roberts said, the case for war
would have hinged on humanitarian concerns for people brutalized by a repressive
regime, not a threat to the United States.
Sen. John D. "Jay"
Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the vice chairman of the committee, was categorical in
comments on the costs of invading a country based on flawed intelligence.
"There is simply no question that mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq
rank among the most devastating losses and intelligence failures in the history
of the nation," Rockefeller said. "The intelligence failure set forth in this
report will affect our national security for generations to come. Our
credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower. We
have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world, and that will
grow."
With accurate intelligence, Rockefeller said, "we in Congress
would not have authorized that war."
Rockefeller said the report was
incomplete because it did not address whether the Bush administration misused
intelligence in making the case for war. That and several other subjects are to
be probed in a follow-up investigation.
The "Report on the U.S.
Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq" spanned 511
pages, reporting the results of a year of investigation by about a dozen
committee staffers who interviewed more than 200 witnesses and examined
thousands of intelligence records.
The report documented breakdowns in
almost every category of intelligence collection and analysis. It was approved
unanimously by the panel of nine Republicans and eight Democrats, although there
were divisions on the panel over some of the war issues.
"A series of
failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization
of the intelligence," the report said in one of its primary conclusions.
Much of the report was focused on the so-called National Intelligence
Estimate that the intelligence community produced in October 2002, a
comprehensive assessment of Iraq's weapons programs that was produced just days
before Congress voted to authorize using force.
The NIE asserted that
Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, was reconstituting its nuclear program
and developing unmanned aircraft to disperse weapons of mass destruction. None
of the claims was backed up by evidence, the Senate report concluded.
Senate investigators said they scoured some 45,000 pages of documents, including
raw intelligence reports, and did not find a single "unambiguous" piece of
intelligence pointing to continued illicit weapons production. Yet rather than
revisit their conclusions, agency analysts chalked the dearth of data up to the
sophistication of Iraq's denial and deception programs.
"Analysts and
collectors assumed that sources who denied the existence or continuation of WMD
programs and stocks were either lying or not knowledgeable about Iraq's
programs," the report said, "while those sources who reported ongoing WMD
activities were seen as having provided valuable information."
Even
when U.N. weapons inspectors reentered Iraq in November 2002 and spent months
scouring the country but finding no evidence of banned weapons stocks, CIA
analysts refused to alter their assumptions, which were largely carried over
from the early 1990s and the period before and after the Persian Gulf War.
The problem of mistaken intelligence worsened over time, as agency
assessments built on earlier analytical work "without carrying forward the
uncertainties of the underlying judgments," a flawed methodology known as
"layering."
The panel also found "significant shortcomings in almost
every aspect of the intelligence community's human intelligence collection
efforts," the report noted. The CIA "did not have a single [human]
source collecting against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq
after 1998" when U.N. inspectors left the country.
This was not for
lack of resources, or a shortage of case officers willing to undertake risky
assignments in Iraq, the report said, but because of a hidebound agency culture
that was averse to taking risks. When Senate investigators asked CIA officials
why they made no effort to put a case officer in the country to investigate
Iraq's weapons programs, a CIA official replied, "Because it's very hard to
sustain…. It takes a rare officer who can go in … and survive
scrutiny for a long time."
Shortly after the release of the report
Friday, CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin defended the agency's record in a
rare news conference at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.
"My first
message to you is a simple one: We get it," a grim-faced McLaughlin said.
"Although we think the judgments were not unreasonable when they were made
nearly two years ago, we understand with all we have learned since then that we
could have done better."
But McLaughlin insisted that the agency
already was taking steps to correct the problems cited by the committee, and
cautioned that it would be wrong to conclude that "sweeping reforms" are
needed.
Of the discredited NIE, McLaughlin said the Senate committee
spent a year "dissecting a document we were asked to produce in less than a
month." He added that the fallout would cause the agency to refrain from
offering firm conclusions in key reports and instead present summaries tempered
by doubts and caveats.
Every NIE now is subjected to a "devil's
advocate" analysis before it is published, McLaughlin said, and the agency is
assembling an outside panel of experts to challenge assessments.
Asked
whether anyone has been fired as a result of the failures, McLaughlin said that
it would be wrong to punish individuals for mistakes made "by hundreds of people
around the world" and by many national intelligence agencies.
McLaughlin is to become acting chief of the CIA on Sunday, when the longtime
director, George J. Tenet, is scheduled to resign. The White House is seeking
a permanent replacement for Tenet, who was not singled out for specific
criticism in the Senate report but has shouldered much of the blame for the CIA
getting the Iraq intelligence wrong.
Although there were no major
revelations in the Senate report, it was rich with fresh detail on an array of
prewar claims that had long been the subject of controversy. The report
dismissed allegations that Iraq had mobile biological weapons laboratories, a
claim that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made in a high-profile
presentation to the United Nations before the war but which had unraveled under
subsequent scrutiny.
The report also poked holes in prewar claims that
Iraq was procuring aluminum tubes to be used as centrifuges to enrich uranium.
Powell and other Bush administration officials cited the tubes as a key piece of
evidence that Iraq was rushing forward with a nuclear weapons program.
The CIA had rejected Iraqi claims and other U.S. analysts' conclusions that the
tubes were for conventional artillery rockets, saying the aluminum used in the
tubes was too expensive — and the design specifications too exacting
— for such a purpose.
But the Senate committee found the
composition and dimensions of the tubes "were consistent with rocket
manufactures in several countries, and, in fact, match exactly the tubes Iraq
had imported years earlier for use in its rocket program which it had declared
to the U.N."
Indeed, Senate staffers interviewed Defense Department
weapons designers who said that the CIA's conclusions were "not correct at all"
and that the aluminum used in the tubes was "the material of choice for low-cost
rocket systems." The U.S. designers said they had been previously asked by the
agency to inspect the tubes and thought the CIA analyst who approached them "had
an agenda."
McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director, disagreed sharply with
the suggestion that the agency shunted aside dissenting views on the aluminum
tubes.
"I completely reject that," he said. The tubes issue "is
thoroughly discussed to a fault in the National Intelligence Estimate."
The one area in which the CIA got high marks was on Iraq's ties to terrorism.
The agency found a history of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda but no evidence
of collaboration, a conclusion the committee endorsed.
According to the
report and committee staffers, Tenet and the CIA's ombudsman — who
investigates complaints from analysts — both said they had been approached
before the Iraq war by analysts complaining of feeling pressured to be more
assertive in linking Iraq to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
According to a committee aide, the ombudsman said that analysts had been forced
to redo work on Iraq-Al Qaeda ties repeatedly and that the "repetitive tasking
became something akin to badgering."
But the report concluded that
there was no evidence that intelligence analysts altered their assessments as a
result of pressure.
Key findings
• False
conclusions about the existence of illicit weapons programs in Iraq were drawn
from intelligence reports that were presented without qualifiers as blunt
assessments of fact.
• The U.S. relied too heavily on
uncorroborated reports from other governments and defectors.
• Warnings about a key informant saying Iraq had a mobile biological
weapons program were ignored. The source, called "Curveball," turned out to be
a fraud.
• "Groupthink" rendered CIA analysts incapable of
considering that Iraq might not have an illicit weapons program and led them to
treat ambiguous intelligence and photos as compelling evidence.
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
Republicans
Pat Roberts, Kansas (chairman)
Orrin G. Hatch, Utah
Mike DeWine, Ohio
Christopher S. Bond,
Missouri
Trent Lott, Mississippi
Olympia J. Snowe, Maine
Chuck Hagel, Nebraska
Saxby Chambliss, Georgia
John W.
Warner, Virginia
Democrats
John D. "Jay"
Rockefeller IV, West Virginia (vice chairman)
Carl Levin, Michigan
Dianne Feinstein, California
Ron Wyden, Oregon
Richard
Durbin, Illinois
Evan Bayh, Indiana
John Edwards, North
Carolina
Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland
Source: U.S.
Senate