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Intelligence report recommends more intelligence power { March 31 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1548906,00.htmlhttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1548906,00.html
March 31, 2005
US intelligence 'dead wrong' about WMD
By Times Online and AP
A panel of America's great and good attacked US spy chiefs as incompetent today, saying that they were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
In a report commissioned by President Bush after the failure to turn up any hidden stockpiles of WMD, the panel also said that the United States knew "disturbingly little" about the threats posed by its most dangerous adversaries.
Led by an appeals court judge, Laurence Silberman, and Charles Robb, the former Republican senator from Virginia, the presidential commission outlined 74 separate recommendations for improving America's intelligence services - most of which, it said, could be implemented without action by Congress.
Most importantly, it urged Mr Bush to give broader powers to John Negroponte, his new Director of National Intelligence, to deal with challenges to his authority from the CIA, Defence Department or other elements of the nation's 15 spy agencies.
It also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine its counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence resources into a new office.
The report is not the first gloomy assessment of US spy agencies since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, considered by far their greatest failure. Numerous investigations have concluded that spy agencies had serious intelligence flaws, but the wording of today's report lays out these failings in unusually blunt language.
It says: "The daily intelligence briefings given ... before the Iraq war were flawed. Through attention-grabbing headlines and repetition of questionable data, these briefings overstated the case that Iraq was rebuilding its WMD programmes."
The unclassified version of the report does not go into significant detail on the intelligence community's abilities in Iran and North Korea for security reasons. Those details are included in the classified version.
It concludes that the intelligence community was "dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," adding: "This was a major intelligence failure."
The main cause, the commission said, was the intelligence community's "inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analysing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence."
"On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude," the report said.
But the commission also said that it found no indication that spy agencies knowingly distorted the evidence they had concerning Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, a charge raised against the administration during last year's presidential campaign.
"This is not 'politicisation'," the panel said of its own report. "It is a necessary part of the intelligence process."
The commission gave Mr Bush a specific suggestion about the daily intelligence briefings he receives - traditionally delivered by the nation's most senior intelligence official. The panel said that Mr Negroponte should not be the person who briefs the President, or even be in the room every day when the report is given.
Overall, the report delivered a harsh verdict, concluding: "Our intelligence community has not been agile and innovative enough to provide the information that the nation needs."
Looking beyond Iraq, the panel examined the ability of the intelligence community to accurately assess the risk posed by America's foes.
"The bad news is that we still know disturbingly little about the weapons programs and even less about the intentions of many of our most dangerous adversaries," it said.
The commission did not name any country, but appeared to be talking about nations such as North Korea and Iran.
"Our review has convinced us that the best hope for preventing future failures is dramatic change," the report said.
"We need an intelligence community that is truly integrated, far more imaginative and willing to run risks, open to a new generation of Americans and receptive to new technologies."
The commission was unanimous in its report and recommendations. It concluded: "The intelligence community needs to be pushed.
"It will not do its best unless it is pressed to the point of discomfort. No important intelligence assessment should be accepted without sharp questioning that forces the [intelligence] community to explain exactly how it came to that assessment and what alternatives.
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