The Hindu : International : Spy agencies were dead wrong on Iraq: report

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Friday, Apr 01, 2005

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Spy agencies were dead wrong on Iraq: report

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON, MARCH 31. In yet another highly critical report but one that does not fault the White House directly, a Presidential Commission has said that spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgements on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; and that the U.S. knows "disturbingly little" about the threats posed by dangerous adversaries.

The commission has come up with as many as 74 recommendations and has called for far reaching changes to prevent future failures. The U.S. President, George W. Bush, has been urged to give more powers to the incoming Director of National Intelligence to deal with challenges. The commission has also called for sweeping changes in the Federal Bureau of Intelligence especially to combine the resources for counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence.

In an indirect way the commission has placed the bad intelligence in the prelude to the Iraq war at the doorsteps of the intelligence agencies and not the White House.

Flawed intelligence

"The daily intelligence briefings given to you before the Iraq war were flawed. Through attention-grabbing headlines and repetition of questionable data, these briefings overstated the case that Iraq was re-building its WMD programmes," the commission said. Mr. Bush is expected to make some remarks after formally receiving the report later during the day.

"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgements about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure," the commission has informed Mr. Bush. The commission was formed a year ago by Mr. Bush to look into the question why America's spy agencies wrongly concluded that Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

Although Mr. Bush has said that his new Director of National Intelligence — his present nominee is John Negroponte — will be the one to brief him daily on intelligence matters, the commission has asked the President to step away from tradition. "For if the DNI is consumed by current intelligence, the long term needs of the intelligence community will suffer," the commission has said.

The commission has been unanimous in its report and recommendations and has stressed that the Mr. Bush must be more demanding of the nation's intelligence community. "The intelligence community needs to be pushed. It will not do its best unless it is pressed by policy makers — sometimes to the point of discomfort," the report has said.

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