AP - Panel: Agencies 'Dead Wrong' on Iraq WMDs

In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows "disturbingly little" about nuclear threats posed by many of its most dangerous adversaries.

The commission called for dramatic change to prevent future failures. It outlined 74 recommendations and said that President Bush could implement most of them without action by Congress. It urged Bush to give broader powers to John Negroponte, his choice to be the new director of national intelligence, to deal with any challenges to his authority from the CIA, Defense Department or other elements of the nation's 15 spy agencies.

It also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office.

The report was the latest tabulation of intelligence shortfalls documented in a series of investigations since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 against the United States. Numerous investigations have concluded that spy agencies had serious intelligence failures before the attacks.

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The report implicitly absolves the administration of manipulating the intelligence used to launch the 2003 Iraq war, putting the blame for bad intelligence directly on the intelligence community.

"The daily intelligence briefings given to you before the Iraq war were flawed," it said. "Through attention-grabbing headlines and repetition of questionable data, these briefings overstated the case that Iraq was rebuilding its WMD programs."

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Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said the failures were widespread.

"I don't think you can blame any one person, although the buck does stop at the top of every one of these agencies," Skelton said. "But quite honestly, the fault is spread out across all the agencies."

The commission was formed by Bush a year ago to look at why U.S. spy agencies mistakenly concluded that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, one of the administration's main justifications for invading in March 2003.

"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the report said. "This was a major intelligence failure."

The main cause was the intelligence community's "inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, it said, and serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence.

AP: New WMD Report to Address Iraq Errors

A presidential commission investigating weapons of mass destruction is highly critical of U.S. intelligence agencies' performance on Iran, North Korea and Libya and attempts to lay out what went wrong on Iraq, according to individuals familiar with the findings.

None of the 15 agencies is expected to be singled out as doing an exemplary job of collecting or assessing intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. The report from the nine-member panel led by Republican Laurence Silberman and Democrat Charles Robb is expected next week.

"I don't get the impression that one [agency] is better than the other," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and a member of the commission.

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Individuals familiar with the report, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, said the commission devoted significant time to dissecting what went wrong on the Iraq intelligence, including many issues that have been examined by internal government investigations and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The commission, for instance, has reconsidered the issue of aluminum tubes. A National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in October 2002 said that most intelligence agencies believed that Iraq's "aggressive pursuit" of high-strength aluminum tubes provided "compelling evidence" that the Saddam Hussein's regime was reconstituting its uranium enrichment effort and nuclear program.

In its report last summer, the Senate Intelligence Committee found that the Energy Department was more accurate in its assessment that Iraq sought the tubes for a conventional rocket program, not a nuclear program.

The Silberman-Robb commission also closely examined U.S. capability to understand the weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, programs of Libya, North Korea and Iran.

Libya has agreed to give up its efforts to develop such weapons of mass destruction and dismantle those it has. Iran and North Korea, however, remain significant hot spots for the United States. Intelligence operatives and analysts are not expected to get glowing marks on their abilities there.

Based on Bush's direction, the commission looked at the merits of creating a new intelligence center devoted to tracking WMD proliferation, as written in the intelligence overhaul law passed in December.

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In contrast to the Sept. 11 commission, the WMD commission's work has been done largely behind closed doors, with only brief press releases about witnesses who appeared provided to the public.

McCain said he's learned much about the intelligence agencies and how they interact now and in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. He said he's gotten an understanding of the value of "human intelligence" — or traditional spying — and that the report was worth the $10 million Congress dedicated to it.

"I think questions had to be answered as to why we were so wrong," McCain said, referring to faulty intelligence on Iraq. "We needed to have recommendations as to how to prevent something like this from ever happening again."

Final drafts of the commission's report are now being circulated among the intelligence agencies for declassification. Historically, they have tried to use that process to keep secret some of the most embarrassing or critical details of investigative findings.

It's unclear how much of this report, which is expected to run hundreds of pages, will be available to the public. Commission spokesman Larry McQuillan said commissioners intend to release as much as possible.

N.Y. Times: Iraq Had WMD 'Stockpiles' in 2003

At Newsmax:

In a stunning about-face, the New York Times reported Sunday that when the U.S. attacked Iraq in March 2003, Saddam Hussein possessed "stockpiles of monitored chemicals and materials," as well as sophisticated equipment to manufacture nuclear and biological weapons, which was removed to "a neighboring state" before the U.S. could secure the weapons sites.

The U.N.'s Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission [UNMOVIC] "has filed regular reports to the Security Council since last May," the paper said, "about the dismantlement of important weapons installations and the export of dangerous materials to foreign states."

"Officials of the commission and the [International] Atomic Energy Agency have repeatedly called on the Iraqi government to report on what it knows of the fate of the thousands of pieces of monitored equipment and stockpiles of monitored chemicals and materials."

Last fall, IAEA director Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed that "nuclear-related materials" had gone missing from monitored sites, calling on Iraqi officials to start the process of accounting for the missing stockpiles still ostensibly under the agency's supervision.

Quoting Sami al-Araji, Iraq's deputy minister of industry since the 1980s, the Times said:

"It appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away."

Calling the operation "sophisticated," Dr. Araji said the removal effort featured "cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites," adding, "They knew what they were doing."

The top Iraqi defense official said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's WMD program.

Dr. Araji said that if the equipment had left the country, its most likely destination was a neighboring state.

The United Nations, worried that the nuclear material and equipment could be used in clandestine bomb production, has been hunting for it throughout the Middle East, largely unsuccessfully, the Times said.