Bush panel rips U.S. intelligence abilities
'Dead wrong' on Iraq; little known about today's enemies
WASHINGTON - In a scathing report released Thursday, President Bush"s commission on weapons of mass destruction found that America"s spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Saddam Hussein"s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
The commission was also highly critical of U.S. abilities to assess what existing adversaries have, stating that the United States knows "disturbingly little" about their weapons programs.
On Saddam, the commission stated that "we conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq"s weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure."
The main cause, the commission said, was the intelligence community"s "inability to collect good information about Iraq"s WMD programs, 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.
"On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude," the report said.
But the commission also said that it found no indication that spy agencies distorted the evidence they had concerning Iraq"s alleged weapons of mass destruction, a charge raised against the administration during last year"s presidential campaign.
"The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments," the report said.
But it added: "It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom
The rest of the story:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7331220/
Report from The Bush Adminstration finally released your opinions??
Dead Wrong On WMD
