U.S. intelligence flayed: Senators repudiate prewar assessments on Iraq

WASHINGTON — A Senate committee issued a scathing repudiation Friday of the U.S. intelligence community's prewar assessment that Iraq had outlawed weapons programs, saying the finding was hyped, lacked evidence and driven by "group think."

The Senate Intelligence Committee report cited numerous examples in which the CIA and other agencies put too much stock in weak information, over-relied on defectors and foreign intelligence services, and were hamstrung by a failure to recruit spies in Saddam Hussein's inner circle.

Moreover, intelligence officials suffered from "group think": a shared conviction that Iraq was hiding a nuclear weapons program and stockpiling biological and chemical warheads. As a result, they interpreted ambiguous evidence as proof and rejected data that contradicted that view, the report said.

The report, endorsed by all nine Republicans and eight Democrats on the committee, found that the primary reason President Bush gave for attacking Iraq was untrue.

Bush "made very declarative statements. There's no question about it," said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the committee's chairman. "He made a case to go to war. We all did. . . . We believed it. But the information was wrong. What he (the president) said was what he got from the intelligence community, and what he got was wrong."

Asked whether he thought going to war was a mistake, Roberts replied: "History is going to judge. I really don't know."

Bush on Friday acknowledged that the prewar intelligence on Iraq was flawed but nevertheless defended his decision to go to war.

Campaigning in Pennsylvania, Bush reacted to the critical report by once again asserting that Saddam Hussein had posed a threat to the United States and other nations.

"Listen, we thought there was going to be stockpiles of weapons," he said at an appearance in Kutztown, Pa. "I thought so. The Congress thought so. The U.N. thought so. I'll tell you what we do know. Saddam Hussein had the capacity to make weapons."

Later, in York, Pa., Bush said, "Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons, I believe we were right to go into Iraq. America is safer today because we did. We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass destruction, and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them."