Senate Report: Bush Used Iraq Intel He Knew Was False

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Senate Report: Bush Used Iraq Intel He Knew Was False

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/05/divided-senate-committee_n_105374.html

6/5/2008

More than five years after the initial invasion of Iraq, the Senate Intelligence Committee has finally gone on the record: the Bush administration misused, and in some cases disregarded, intelligence which led the nation into war. The two final sections of a long-delayed and much anticipated "Phase II" report on the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence, released on Thursday morning, accuse senior White House officials of repeatedly misrepresenting the threat posed by Iraq.

In addition, the report on Iraq war intelligence harshly criticizes a Pentagon office for executing "inappropriate, sensitive intelligence activities" without the proper knowledge of the State Department and other agencies.

In addition to judgments that could prove troublesome for the White House and make waves in the presidential race, the report also contains some stinging minority reports from Republican committee members who allege that Democrats turned the intelligence review process into a "partisan exercise."

However, when the GOP controlled the intelligence committee and steered its "Phase I" reporting on the use of Iraq war intelligence, critics complained that tough questions about the Bush administration's actions had been kicked down the road, and thus required a second round of fact finding -- dubbed "Phase II." The committee's delay in producing that full report to the public was seen by Democrats as evidence of a stonewalling campaign executed by President Bush's Republican Senate allies.

Former Committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) often vacillated over whether or not the report was worth completing, first promising in 2004 that the work would be finished, and then calling it a "monumental waste of time" later in 2005. When Democrats gained control of the Senate after the 2006 midterm elections, they gained a majority of seats on the committee and set the course for the production of the final reports. Whether by partisan design or simple chance, however, the committee managed to save some of the best questions for last.

The "Phase II" report states -- in terms clearer than any previous government publication -- that there was no operational relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, that Bush officials were not truthful about the difficulties the United States would face in post-war Iraq and that their public statements did not reflect intelligence they had at the time, and, specifically, that the intelligence community would not confirm any meeting between Iraqi officials and Mohamed Atta -- a claim that was nevertheless publicly repeated.

"Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence," Rockefeller said in a statement provided to The Huffington Post.

"In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed. ... There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate."

In a minority report authored by Sens. Orrin Hatch, Christopher Bond and Richard Burr, the Republicans accuse committee Democrats of committing a key error of governmental logic. "Intelligence informs policy. It does not dictate policy," they wrote. "Intelligence professionals are responsible for their failures in intelligence collection, analysis, counter-intelligence and covert action. Policymakers must also bear the burden of their mistakes, an entirely different order of mistakes. It is a pity this report fails to illuminate this distinction."

The key findings released by Rockefeller and his divided committee brings the five-part "Phase II" of the committee's report on prewar intelligence to completion. The investigation's first phase was released on July 2004, and two less controversial parts of "Phase II" were declassified in September 2006.

The potential election year impact of these latest findings is uncertain. On the stump, Sen. John McCain has explained his support of the "surge" strategy in Iraq by saying the country has become the "central front" in the war on terror -- a framing that attempts to shoot past the question of Iraq's status in the terror hierarchy during the 2003 campaign waged in Congress to authorize military action.

Still, the breadth of the Committee's citations of examples in which the Bush administration's comments were not supported by intelligence could reignite public dissatisfaction over the war. According to a release from Rockefeller's office that was provided to The Huffington Post, these examples include:

Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.

"It has been four years since the Committee began the second phase of its review," Sen. Dianne Feinstein wrote in her note attached to the report. "The results are now in. Even though the intelligence before the war supported inaccurate statements, this Administration distorted the intelligence in order to build its case to go to war. The Executive Branch released only those findings that supported the argument, did not relay uncertainties, and at times made statements beyond what the intelligence supported."

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U.S. Senate report cites intelligence flaws in lead up to Iraq war

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/05/america/intel.4-283204.php

By Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti Published: June 5, 2008

WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush and his aides built a public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and ignoring disagreements among spy agencies over Iraq's weapons programs and Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda, according to a Senate report long delayed by partisan squabbling.

The report accuses Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the months before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and playing on American fears in emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"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," said Senator John Rockefeller 4th, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a statement accompanying his committee's 171-page report.

At the same time, the report found that on several key issues, including Iraq's alleged nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, public statements from Bush, Cheney and other senior officials were generally "substantiated" by the best estimates of American spy agencies. But the report, which was endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, found that these public statements often did not reflect the agencies' uncertainty about the evidence.

In a separate report released Wednesday, the intelligence committee provided new details about a series of clandestine meetings in Paris and Rome between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the regime in Tehran, and were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about internal rivalries inside Iran and alleged Iranian "hit" teams targeting American troops in Afghanistan.

The report concludes that Steven 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 paints the meetings as a rogue intelligence-gathering operation and accuses Hadley and Wolfowitz of keeping the State Department and intelligence agencies in the dark about the meetings.

Some Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from some of its findings and attached a detailed minority report that listed prewar statements by Rockefeller and other Democrats describing the threat posed by Iraq.

"The report released today was a waste of committee time and resources that should have been spent overseeing the intelligence community," said the minority report, signed by Senator Christopher Bond of Missouri, the committee's top Republican, and three Republican colleagues.

They also accused Democrats of hypocrisy; namely, refusing to include misleading public statements by top Democrats like Rockefeller and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As an example, they pointed to an Oct. 2002 speech by Rockefeller, in which he said 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 two reports are 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, completed in July 2004, identified grave faults in the intelligence agencies' collection and analysis of the threat posed by Saddam.

In order to complete that initial 2004 report, committee members agreed to put off several of the more politically volatile topics. Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who was then chairman, nonetheless declared nearly four years ago that the phase two effort was "a priority. I made my commitment and it will get done."

But a lengthy standoff ensued. Democrats accused Republicans of dodging their demands to complete the inquiry in order to protect the Bush administration from damaging revelations. Republican insisted that they were not dragging their feet and asserted that the findings might well turn out to embarrass congressional Democrats.

In September 2006, the committee issued reports on two parts of the phase two study, one on how prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs and links to terrorism compared with postwar findings and another on the intelligence agencies' use of information from the Iraqi National Congress, the controversial opposition group to Saddam.

In May 2007, the committee, now led by Democrats, put out a third part of the review, this one examining prewar predictions by the intelligence agencies about postwar Iraq.

But it would take another year to complete the most delicate part of the planned inquiry, the look at prewar public statements by executive branch officials. In the end, the Republicans chose to issue their own dissenting report, aimed at showing that some Democrats who have been eager to attack the administration had themselves made bellicose comments about Saddam and the threat he posed.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, once seen as a relative refuge from the political maneuvering and brawling that characterizes many other committees, has been mired in partisan dispute for most of the last five years. The reports made public Thursday and the polarized comments accompanying them are unlikely to improve relations between Rockefeller and Bond and their party colleagues on the committee.

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Bush misused Iraq intelligence - US Senate report

http://www.reuters.com/article/middleeastCrisis/idUSN05318923

By Randall Mikkelsen
Thu Jun 5, 2008 1:18pm EDT

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush and his top policymakers misstated Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism and ignored doubts among intelligence agencies about Iraq's arms programs as they made a case for war, the Senate intelligence committee reported on Thursday.

The report shows an administration that "led the nation to war on false premises," said the committee's Democratic Chairman, Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia. Several Republicans on the committee protested its findings as a "partisan exercise."

The committee studied major speeches by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials in advance of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and compared key assertions with intelligence available at the time.

Statements that Iraq had a partnership with al Qaeda were wrong and unsupported by intelligence, the report said.

It said that Bush's and Cheney's assertions that Saddam was prepared to arm terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction for attacks on the United States contradicted available intelligence.

Such assertions had a strong resonance with a U.S. public, still reeling after al Qaeda's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Polls showed that many Americans believed Iraq played a role in the attacks, even long after Bush acknowledged in September 2003 that there was no evidence Saddam was involved.

The report also said administration prewar statements on Iraq's weapons programs were backed up in most cases by available U.S. intelligence, but officials failed to reflect internal debate over those findings, which proved wrong.

PUBLIC CAMPAIGN
The long-delayed Senate study supported previous reports and findings that the administration's main cases for war -- that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was spreading them to terrorists -- were inaccurate and deeply flawed.

"The president and his advisors undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the (Sept. 11) attacks to use the war against al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein," Rockefeller said in written commentary on the report.

"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."

A statement to Congress by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the Iraqi government hid weapons of mass destruction in facilities underground was not backed up by intelligence information, the report said. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said Rumsfeld's comments should be investigated further, but he stopped short of urging a criminal probe.

The committee voted 10-5 to approve the report, with two Republican lawmakers supporting it. Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri and three other Republican panel members denounced the study in an attached dissent.

"The committee finds itself once again consumed with political gamesmanship," the Republicans said. The effort to produce the report "has indeed resulted in a partisan exercise." They said, however, that the report demonstrated that Bush administration statements were backed by intelligence and "it was the intelligence that was faulty."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: "We had the intelligence that we had, fully vetted, but it was wrong. We certainly regret that and we've taken measures to fix it."

PUBLIC SUPPORT
U.S. public opinion on the war, supportive at first, has soured, contributing to a dive in Bush's popularity.

The conflict is likely to be a key issue in the November presidential election between Republican John McCain, who supports the war, and Democrat Barack Obama, who opposed the war from the start and says he would aim to pull U.S. troops out within 16 months of taking office in January 2009.

Rockefeller has announced his support for Obama.

The administration's record in making its case for Iraq has also been cited by critics of Bush's get-tough policy on Iran. They accuse Bush of overstating the potential threat of Iran's nuclear program in order to justify the possible use of force.

A second report by the committee faulted the administration's handling of December 2001 Rome meetings between defense officials and Iranian informants, which dealt with the Iran issue. It said department officials failed to share intelligence from the meeting, which Rockefeller said demonstrated a "fundamental disdain" for other intelligence agencies.

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Senate Panel Accuses Bush of Iraq Exaggerations

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/washington/05cnd-intel.html?hp

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: June 5, 2008

WASHINGTON — In a report long delayed by partisan squabbling, the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday accused President Bush and Vice President Cheney of taking the country to war in Iraq by exaggerating evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

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,” Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, the committee’s Democratic chairman, said in a statement accompanying the 171-page report.

The committee’s report cited some instances in which public statements by senior administration officials were not supported by the intelligence available at the time, such as suggestions that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda were operating in a kind of partnership, that the Baghdad regime had provided the terrorist network with weapons training, and that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers had met an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague in 2001.

But the report found that on several key issues, including Iraq’s alleged nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, public statements from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other top officials before the war were generally “substantiated” by the best estimates of the intelligence agencies, though the statements did not always reflect the agencies’ uncertainty about the evidence. All the weapons claims were disproved after invading troops found no unconventional arsenal and little effort to build one.

Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from some of its findings and attached a detailed minority report that listed pre-war statements by Mr. Rockefeller and other Democrats describing the threat posed by Iraq.

“The report released today was a waste of committee time and resources that should have been spent overseeing the intelligence community,” said the minority report, signed by Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the committee’s top Republican, and three Republican colleagues.

A second committee report, also made public on Thursday, detailed a series of clandestine meetings between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in Rome and Paris in 2001 and 2003. It accused Steven Hadley, now the national security advisor, and Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary, of failing to properly inform the intelligence agencies and the State Department about the meetings.

The two reports are the final parts of the committee’s so-called “phase two” investigation of pre-war intelligence on Iraq and related issues. The first phase of the inquiry, completed in July 2004, identified grave faults in the intelligence agencies’ collection and analysis of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

In order to complete that initial 2004 report, committee members agreed to put off several of the more politically volatile topics. Sen. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who was then chairman, nonetheless declared nearly four years ago that the phase two effort was “a priority. I made my commitment and it will get done.”

But a lengthy standoff ensued. Democrats accused Republicans of dodging their demands to complete the inquiry in order to protect the Bush administration from damaging revelations. Republicans insisted that they were not dragging their feet and asserted that the findings might well turn out to embarrass Congressional Democrats.

In September 2006, the committee issued reports on two parts of the phase two study, one on how pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs and links to terrorism compared with post-war findings and another on the intelligence agencies’ use of information from the Iraqi National Congress, the controversial opposition group to Saddam Hussein.

In May 2007, the committee, now led by Democrats, put out a third part of the phase two review, this one examining pre-war predictions by the intelligence agencies about post-war Iraq.

But it would take another year to complete the most delicate part of the planned inquiry, the look at pre-war public statements by executive branch officials. In the end, the Republicans chose to issue their own dissenting report, aimed at showing that some Democrats who have been eager to attack the administration had themselves made bellicose comments about Saddam Hussein and the threat he posed.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, once seen as a relative refuge from the political maneuvering and brawling that characterizes many other committees, has been mired in partisan dispute for most of the last five years. Thursday’s reports and the polarized comments accompanying them are unlikely to improve relations between Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Bond and their party colleagues on the committee.

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Bush glossed over intel differences on Iraq WMD: probe

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gXMVVLEC1PG0z--41tyBlrwTA5nQ

3 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) — President George W. Bush glossed over differences but generally reflected US intelligence findings in making the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a congressional probe concluded Thursday.

But the investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that separate claims by Bush and others that there was a nexus between Al-Qaeda, Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction were not backed up by intelligence.

"In the push to rally public support for the invasion of Iraq, administration officials often failed to accurately portray what was known, what was not known, and what was suspected about Iraq and the threat it represented to our national security," said Senator John D. Rockefeller, the committee chairman.

The committee released the last two installments of a politically contentious, long running investigation into the prewar intelligence on Iraq, which the invasion exposed as almost entirely wrong about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

One report examined the workings of a controversial Pentagon policy group accused of cherry-picking intelligence.

The other compared public statements made in the run-up to the war by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials, to the intelligence available at the time.

The administration's key rationale for the war was that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was reviving its nuclear program and was prepared to give terrorist groups weapons of mass destruction for attacks on the United States.

The probe concluded that statements by Bush, Cheney and others about a possible Iraqi nuclear weapons program were "generally substantiated by the intelligence community estimates, but did not convey the substantial disagreement that existed in the intelligence community."

The administration had cited Iraq's acquisition of aluminium tubes as evidence of a nuclear program, even though two US agencies thought the tubes were for conventional rocket programs and unsuited for centrifuges.

After the invasion, US intelligence found that Iraq had ended its nuclear program in 1991 after the first Gulf War.

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Senate report slams Bush over prewar intelligence

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/05/senate.iraq/

6/5/2008

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration misused intelligence to build a case for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report issued Thursday.

President Bush didn't request intelligence reports about the post-war situation, the Senate panel's report says.

The White House exploited its ability to declassify intelligence selectively to bolster its case for war, the committee chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-West Virginia, said in the report.

Senior officials disclosed and discussed sensitive intelligence reports that supported the administration's policy objectives and kept out of public discourse information that did not, he said.

The report also found that the administration misled the American people about contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

"Policymakers' statements did not accurately convey the intelligence assessments" about contacts between the then-Iraqi leader and Osama bin Laden's group, "and left the impression that the contacts led to substantive Iraqi cooperation or support of al Qaeda," the report said.

"Statements and implications by the president and secretary of state suggesting that Iraq and al Qaeda had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al Qaeda with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence," according to the committee's exhaustive report on prewar intelligence.

The top Republican on the committee dismissed its findings as "partisan gamesmanship."

"It is ironic that the Democrats would knowingly distort and misrepresent the committee's findings and the intelligence in an effort to prove that the administration distorted and mischaracterized the intelligence," said Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri.

The White House also rejected the report as old news.

"I know this is another report, and I'm sure that they put a lot of considerable thought into it, but this is a subject that has been gone over many many, many times, and I don't know of anything that's particularly new in it," said spokeswoman Dana Perino, who said she had not yet read it.

She said the White House relied on the same information as the rest of the world, admitting that it was wrong but denying that Bush had set out to mislead the country.

White House claims that Hussein was seeking weapons of mass destruction were partially backed by available intelligence, the report found, but did not reflect disputes within the intelligence community.

The CIA, among others, believed Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear weapons, but the Department of Energy disagreed, the report said.

No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq after the invasion.

The report also took the administration to task for its predictions about the aftermath of the invasion, including Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators.

Bush and Cheney did not request intelligence reports about the post-war situation, and their public statements did not reflect doubts and uncertainties in the intelligence community, the report said.

The report comes days after former White House press spokesman Scott McClellan published a book saying Bush decided on war with Iraq soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

"Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitious purpose of transforming the Middle East. Rather than open this Pandora's Box, the administration chose a different path -- not employing out-and-out deception, but shading the truth," McClellan wrote in his memoir, "What Happened."

Current and former White House officials have dismissed McClellan's accusations, saying he was not in a position to know about top-level White House decision-making before the war when he was deputy press secretary.

The Senate committee chairman slammed the White House in a statement marking the release of the long-awaited report.

"Before taking the country to war, this administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced," Rockefeller said Thursday.

"Unfortunately, our committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence. In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed," he added.

The report picked apart three speeches by Bush, including his 2003 State of the Union address two months before the invasion, one by Cheney and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's U.N. presentation about Iraq in the run-up to the war.

The report was approved by a 10-5 vote, with some Republicans dissenting.

Some GOP members of the committee had wanted the report to examine prewar statements by Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Democrats on the committee blocked the suggestion and limited the report's purview to administration statements only.