WASHINGTON -Half a dozen investigations into U.S. intelligence failures on Iraq have reached similar conclusions: limited and unreliable information from inside Iraq
and an unshakable belief by Bush administration officials that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
The latest and most definitive findings came this week from the head of the U.S. weapons hunt in Iraq, Charles Duelfer. He concluded that Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, had no programs to make them or nuclear bombs, and had little ability to revive the banned weapons programs.
President Bush and administration officials used Saddam's alleged weapons stockpiles as the main justification to invade Iraq in March 2003.
Bush now says Saddam had the ability to make weapons and give them to terrorists, an assertion he repeated yesterday. But Duelfer and other experts now say that is probably false as well.
Much of the accumulated body of our intelligence was wrong and we must find out why
Bush said. But he maintained that the Iraqi leader retained the means and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction.
Democratic challenger John Kerry has criticized Bush as being too eager to go to war with Iraq and unwilling to admit mistakes.
My fellow Americans you don't make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact Kerry said yesterday, adding that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney may well be the last two people on the planet who won't face the truth about Iraq.
With America's credibility at stake, Congress is debating proposals for sweeping changes in the way the government gathers, shares, analyzes and uses intelligence.
The shortcomings, according to the reports issued thus far, predate the Bush administration and contributed to intelligence failures before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The reports stated that U.S. analysts had an unshakable belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Intelligence analysts succumbed to group think that reinforced conclusions that Saddam had weapons and downplayed contrary evidence, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report earlier this year.
The CIA's prewar conclusions that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and a nuclear program were not supported even by the agency's limited and unreliable information, the report said.
The weapons assumption also was a problem in Great Britain, where intelligence services made similar conclusions.
A British panel said errors occurred in part because analysts were wrong about the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Iraq was much closer to making a nuclear weapon than previously thought.
We detected a tendency for assessments to be colored by overreaction to previous errors
the commission headed by Lord Butler reported in July.
Another problem was getting accurate information from inside Iraq. After United Nations weapons inspectors left in 1998, there was no authoritative source to monitor Saddam.
Duelfer's predecessor as head of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, said the U.S. was almost addicted to reports from U.N. inspectors. After the inspectors left, intelligence agencies relied on information supplied by defectors
some of whom certainly fabricated much that they supplied
Kay said in January.
As it turns out, Duelfer reported, Saddam's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons infrastructure was crumbling as Iraq waited for the end of U.N. sanctions.
Both the British and American reports faulted intelligence agencies for relying on Iraqi dissidents and exiles who told their handlers what they wanted to hear.
The analysts who were forced to make judgments about this ... didn't have any ground truth. They spent a lot of time looking at computer screens
but not a lot of time talking to Iraqis
not a lot of time walking around Iraqi plants and getting a feel for them
Duelfer said Wednesday.
Similar information gaps occurred before the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Sept. 11 commission found.
The FBI and CIA were not focused enough on terrorism and did not share information, the commission said.
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