A pair of Intelligence Committee reports released Thursday said Bush administration officials gave biased and incomplete assessments of Iraq’s threat to the U.S. and inappropriately tried to implicate Iran as a threat to national security.
{mosads}“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,” said Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chairman John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.). “Unfortunately, our committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence.”
The reports were backed by a bipartisan majority. The first examined whether statements from administration officials were backed by intelligence, while the second “details inappropriate, sensitive intelligence activities conducted by the DoD’s Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, without the knowledge of the Intelligence Community or the State Department.”
A pair of press conferences are scheduled for later today, with Democrats and Republicans both angling to provide separate views of the reports.
The report on executive statements focuses on five speeches by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in late 2002 and early 2003, as well as a variety of statements to the media. The report’s conclusions said those statements were “generally substantiated” by U.S. intelligence, but did not convey “substantial disagreements” or different interpretations that many officials had at the time. Some speeches and statements were backed up, but others, such as claims of a link between Iraq and al Qaeda, were not.
“In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent,” Rockefeller said. “As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
The report on the Pentagon policy teams focuses on a special group within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy that was tasked with gathering intelligence on Iran and Iraq. Over eight conclusions, the report says that the group performed shoddy work, such as an inappropriate meeting with Iranian exiles in Rome in December 2001 in an attempt to prove a terrorism case against Iran, and that Defense officials did not adequately investigate the intelligence that was gathered.