The Hindu : International : U.S. Senate slams intelligence agencies

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Saturday, Jul 10, 2004

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International

U.S. Senate slams intelligence agencies

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON, JULY 9. In a scathing report the Senate Intelligence Committee has slammed the country's intelligence agencies on a number of fronts, essentially making the point that while objectivity of analysts could not be faulted, they got careless in assessing the threat levels of Iraq prior to the war. The intelligence agencies were victims of "group think" that made them not to question ambiguous information and data, the bipartisan committee has said.

The intelligence panel has said that the agencies overstated the threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, relied on dubious sources and even ignored evidence to the contrary in the run up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. The ranking member on the Committee, John Rockefeller, made the point during presentation that the Senate would not have voted for the war resolution in 2002 if it had known how deeply flawed the intelligence was.

"The administration, at all levels, and to some extent the U. S. ,used bad information to bolster its case for war. And we in Congress would not have authorised that war...with 75 votes if we knew what we know now", the West Virginia Democrat said.

"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 gore's a direct consequence our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before", he said.

Leading Democrats are not saying at this point that the views of the intelligence community were "shaped" by the administration. Or as the California Democrat Diane Feinstein put it, "In my view that remains an open question that needs more careful scrutiny".

On more than one occasion the Senate report directly hammers the outgoing head of the Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet, for skewing advice to top policy makers and in effect making sure that dissenting views from other agencies such as the State or the Defence Departments were not heard or presented.

"This `group think' dynamic led intelligence community analysts, collectors and managers, both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD programme as well as ignore or minimise evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programmes", the Senate report has said.

The report also speaks of "puffing" up information. For instance the presence of one specialised truck for the transfer of chemical weapons was "puffed" up to a conclusion that Baghdad was indeed actively making chemical weapons.

Presenting the report the Chair of the Senate Committee, the Republican Pat Roberts stressed that most of the key judgements in the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002 — used by Congress as a benchmark— were either "overstated" or simply "not supported" by the raw intelligence data.

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