The Senate Intelligence Committee's Report on prewar intelligence was issued this morning.
You can find the full report here and the somewhat briefer conclusions report here.
I haven't quite finished the 511 page report yet, but it seems that it concludes exactly what's been discussed in the past few days: The C.I.A. fucked up royal.
In a long-awaited report that goes to the heart of President Bush's rationale for going to war against Iraq, the committee said that prewar assessments of Saddam Hussein's supposed arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and his desire to have nuclear weapons, were wildly off the mark.
"Today, we know these assessments were wrong, and as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who heads the panel, said at a briefing on the 511-page report.
The report "found no evidence that intelligence analysts were subjected to overt political pressure to tailor their findings." Okay, how about subtle pressure? Did you look into that? I don't think anyone was expecting a memo signed by the president saying, "Dear CIA, Please falsify intelligence. Your Friend, George."
It's very important that we get to the bottom of these massive intelligence failures. It's equally critical, though, that Congress investigate not only whether political pressure was exerted on the intelligence community, but why the administration continued to treat the faulty intelligence as fact long after it was clear that there had been major mistakes. Whether or not they pushed for the intelligence in the first place, the administration continued -- and continues to this day -- to use this information to justify their actions.
So there you go. The one point the C.I.A. got right is also the only one that the administration has consistently contradicted.
