Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq: Encyclopedia II - Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq - The report's conclusions

Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq - The report's conclusions

The 511-page report focuses much of its attention on the October, 2002, classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) titled Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction. The report includes 117 formal conclusions, as well as supporting discussion and background information.

Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq - General conclusions on intelligence relating to Iraq's WMD and ties to terrorism

The report's first conclusion points to widespread flaws in the October 2002 NIE, and attributes those flaws to failure by analysts in the intelligence community:

Subsequent conclusions fault the intelligence community for failing to adequately explain to policymakers the uncertainties that underlay the NIE's conclusions, and for succumbing to "group think," in which the intelligence community adopted untested (and, in hindsight, unwarranted) assumptions about the extent of Iraq's WMD stockpiles and programs. The committee identified a failure to adequately supervise analysts and collectors, and a failure to develop human sources of intelligence (HUMINT) inside Iraq after the departure of international weapons inspectors in 1998. It also cited the post-9/11 environment as having led to an increase in the intensity with which policymakers review and question threat information.

Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq - Niger and the Iraqi nuclear program

Section II of the report discussed the handling of intelligence indicating that Iraq might be attempting to purchase uranium from Niger. The report examined the role played by former ambassador Joseph Wilson in investigating the issue, and the way Wilson's assessment was communicated within the intelligence community. It also discusses the process whereby references to Iraq's uranium-procurement efforts were removed from some speeches at the behest of intelligence officials, but left in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. The report concludes that prior to October, 2002, it was reasonable for the intelligence community to assess Iraq may have been attempting to obtain uranium from Africa.

Section III of the report discusses assessments of Iraq's domestic nuclear program. It focuses a significant amount of attention on the intelligence process that took place in the spring of 2001 regarding Iraq's attempts to purchase 60,000 high-strength aluminum tubes. The CIA concluded that the tubes could be intended for constructing centrifuges for a uranium-enrichment program (i.e., for a restarted Iraqi nuclear weapons program); analysts in the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense considered that to be unlikely.

The October 2002 NIE stated that Iraq appeared to be reconsitituting its nuclear weapons program. The Committee's report concluded that this view was not supported by the underlying intelligence, and the report agreed with the opinion of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, expressed as an "alternative view" in the NIE, that the available intelligence did not make "a compelling case for reconstitution" of the Iraqi nuclear program. The committee reached several conclusions critical of poor communications between the CIA and other parts of the intelligence community concerning this issue.

Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq - Biological weapons chemical weapons and delivery systems

The sections of the report concerned with assessments of Iraq's biological weapons programs, chemical weapons programs, and delivery systems contain extensive discussion of the problem of inadequate "human intelligence" for intelligence gathering in Iraq. There is discussion of "CURVEBALL," an Iraqi defector who provided much of the information regarding Iraq's alleged mobile bioweapons labs, although much of the material in this part of the report has been redacted. The report concludes that the October 2002 NIE and other statements regarding Iraq's biological and chemical WMD and associated delivery systems were for the most part not supported by the underlying intelligence data supplied to the Committee.

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts told NBC's Tim Russert that "Curveball really provided 98 percent of the assessment as to whether or not the Iraqis had a biological weapon."[1] This was in despite the fact that "nobody inside the U.S. government had ever actually spoken to the informant—except [for a single] Pentagon analyst, who concluded the man was an alcoholic and utterly useless as a source."[2]

After learning the intelligence provided by Curveball was going to be used as the "backbone" of the case for war, the Pentagon analyst wrote a letter to the CIA expressing his concerns. The Deputy of the CIA Counter Proliferation Unit quickly responded by saying:

"Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say. The Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about."[3][4]

One area where the Committee found that the intelligence community's reporting accurately reflected the underlying intelligence concerned Iraq's retention of Scud-type ballistic missiles, and its development of new types of short- and medium-range missiles. In the case of the NIE's reporting on Iraq's development of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), however, the Committee found that the reporting generally was not well-supported by the underlying intelligence, and overstated what was known concerning the likelihood that the Iraqi UAVs were intended for use as a delivery means for biological weapons.

Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq - Colin Powell's speech to the UN

Section VII of the Committee's report focuses on the intelligence behind Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the UN on February 5, 2002. The report describes the process whereby the CIA provided a draft of the speech to the National Security Council (NSC), and then, at the request of the NSC, worked to expand the speech with additional material, especially regarding Iraq's nuclear program. The report also describes the subsequent review made by Colin Powell and analysts from the State Department with analysts from the CIA. In the speech, Powell said that "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." Despite this, the Committee concluded that "[m]uch of the information provided or cleared by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for inclusion in Secretary Powell’s speech was overstated, misleading, or incorrect."

Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq - Pressure on analysts

The report partially looks at the question of whether pressure was brought to bear on intelligence analysts to get them to shape their assessments to support particular policy objectives. It recounts how Sen. Roberts made repeated public calls for any analysts who believed they had been pressured to alter their assessments to speak with the Committee about their experiences. The Committee also attempted to identify and interview several individuals who had described such pressure in media reports and government documents. The report says that the Committee did not find any evidence that administration officials tried to pressure analysts to change their judgments; however, an evaluation of the Bush Administration's use of intelligence was put off until "phase two" of the investigation. (Several Democratic committee members, although they voted to approve the report's conclusions, expressed reservations on this issue and Republicans also acknowlegded that the issue of "pressure" would be examined during phase two; see below, in the discussion of the report's "additional views", for details.)

Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq - The October 2002 white paper

A white paper titled "Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction" was released by CIA Director George Tenet on October 4, 2002, three days after the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraqi WMD was released. In part, the white paper was a response to Congressional requests for an unclassified version of the information in the NIE, since that document was available only to a small group of lawmakers due to its classified nature. The white paper, although shorter and less-detailed than the NIE, was very similar to it in format and major conclusions. The Committee found that the white paper presented a significantly stronger characterization of the threat represented by Iraqi WMD than did the NIE, and that that stronger characterization was not supported by the underlying intelligence.

Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq - Iraq's alleged links to al-Qaeda

For more information, see Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda

Several sections in the report examine topics relating to allegations of links between Iraq and terrorism. The Committee said that the intelligence community produced reasonable conclusions on this topic.

Much of the Committee's investigation in this area concerned the CIA's preparation and distribution of a document titled Iraqi Support for Terrorism. An initial version of this document was distributed to senior Bush administration officials in September, 2002; an updated version of the document was provided to Congress in January, 2003. The conclusion of CIA analysts was that although Saddam Hussein's government had likely had several contacts with al Qaeda during the 1990s, "those contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship." The CIA also attempted to determine the attitudes that Iraqi and al-Qaeda leadership held toward the possibility of working cooperatively with each other. The available intelligence in this area suggested that Iraqi and al-Qaeda leaders would be wary of working together.

The "most problematic area of contact between Iraq and al-Qaida were the reports of training in the use of non-conventional weapons, specifically chemical and biological weapons." Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been present in Baghdad, and an al-Qaeda affiliate organization that identified itself as the "sworn enemy" of Saddam Hussein had operated in northeastern Iraq in an area under Kurdish control. There was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an al Qaeda attack. The report criticized the CIA for its lack of human intelligence resources in Iraq to assess the country's ties with terrorism during the time prior to 2002.

In terms of pressure on analysts, the Committee said that after 9/11, "analysts were under tremendous pressure to make correct assessments, to avoid missing a credible threat, and to avoid an intelligence failure on the scale of 9/11." The Committee concluded that this resulted in assessments that were "bold and assertive in pointing out potential terrorist links," and that this pressure was more the result of analysts' own desire to be as thorough as possible, than of any undue influence by the administration, for which the Committee said they found no evidence. Several Democratic members of the Committee said in the report's "additional views" that the question had not been adequately explored.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The report's conclusions", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki