Report Assails C.I.A. for Failure on Iraq Weapons

The New York Times reports that the final report of a presidential commission studying American intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles:

The report particularly singles out the Central Intelligence Agency under its former director, George J. Tenet, but also includes what one senior official called "a hearty condemnation" of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

The unclassified version of the report, which is more than 400 pages long, devotes relatively little space to North Korea and , the two nations now posing the largest potential nuclear challenge to the United States and its allies. Most of that discussion appears only in a much longer classified version.

In the words of one administration official who has reviewed the classified version, "we don't give Kim Jong Il or the mullahs a window into what we know and what we don't," referring to the North Korean leader and 's clerical leaders.

[. . .]

As early copies of the report circulated inside the government on Monday, officials said much of the discussion of Iraq went over ground already covered by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by the two reports of the Iraq Survey Group, which was set up by the government to search for prohibited weapons after the Iraq invasion, and came up basically empty-handed.

[. . .]

But in retrospect, those assumptions by American and other intelligence analysts turned out to be deeply flawed, even though some of Mr. Hussein's own commanders said after they were captured in 2003 that they also believed the government held some unconventional weapons. It was a myth Mr. Hussein apparently fostered to retain an air of power.

[. . .]

The commission's mandate was to examine the intelligence agencies' ability to "collect, process, analyze and disseminate information concerning the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign powers." Besides Iraq, and North Korea, that mandate covered terrorist groups and private nuclear black market networks created by Dr. A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist.

Doesn't sound like we will learn anything new from this report.

Comments

[c stu]

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