> Bush Inflated Threat From Iraq's Banned Weapons, Report Says
>
> By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus
> Washington Post Staff Writers
> Friday, June 6, 2008; A03
>
>
>
> President Bush and top administration officials repeatedly
> exaggerated what they knew about Iraq's weapons and its ties to
> terrorist groups as the White House pressed its case for war against
> Iraq, the Senate intelligence committee said yesterday in a
> long-awaited report.
> While most of the administration's prewar claims about Iraq reflected
> now-discredited U.S. intelligence reports, the White House crossed a
> line by conveying certainty about the threat that Saddam Hussein
> posed to the United States, according to the report, approved over
> the objections of most of the committee's Republican members.
>
> "In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented
> intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even
> nonexistent," Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the committee
> chairman, said at a news conference. "As a result, the American
> people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater
> than actually existed."
> The report, the last and most contentious of a series of Senate
> reviews of prewar intelligence, sought to compare the
> administration's public claims about Iraq with the intelligence
> reports available to them at the time. While many of the White
> House's statements -- such as Bush's warnings about a secret Iraqi
> nuclear program -- were amply supported by intelligence files at the
> time, the report said, others were not.
> Bush and other administration officials strayed far from official
> intelligence reports when it came to describing alleged ties between
> al-Qaeda and Hussein, the report said. It cited repeated statements
> by Bush, including his Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech in which he
> alleged that Iraq had "trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making" and
> had maintained "high-level contacts that go back a decade."
>
> The report said that "statements and indications by the president and
> secretary of state suggesting that Iraq and al-Qaeda had a
> partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qaeda with weapons
> training, were not substantiated by the intelligence."
>
> Approved by eight Democrats and two Republicans on the 15-member
> committee, the report also highlights an October 2002 claim by
> then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that Iraq had concealed its
> stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in underground bunkers too
> deep to be destroyed by air power alone. Rumsfeld, in testimony to
> the Senate Armed Services Committee, had told senators that U.S.
> officials did "know where a fraction" of Hussein's banned weapons
> were, adding that a "good many are underground and deeply buried,"
> suggesting that ground forces were required to destroy them. His
> statement contradicted intelligence at the time that no such
> facilities were known to exist, the report states.
> Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a committee member, called for a separate
> investigation of Rumsfeld's statements, which he said appeared
> intended to drive support for an invasion. "This is stunning: The
> secretary of defense, testifying before Congress about whether or not
> ground forces would be strategically necessary in a war against Iraq,
> said the executive branch 'knew' something that it did not know," he
> said.
> The report's conclusions were sharply criticized by several
> Republican members, who accused the Democratic majority of rehashing
> old material for political advantage.
>
> Committee Vice Chairman Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) called the new
> report a "waste of time" and said the allegations about
> administration officials were deliberately misleading. "It is ironic
> that the Democrats would knowingly distort and misrepresent the
> Committee's findings and the intelligence in an effort to prove that
> the Administration distorted and mischaracterized the intelligence,"
> he said.
> Bond also noted that key Democrats -- including several who ran for
> their party's presidential nomination this year -- also made public
> statements during the same period portraying Iraq's weapons as a
> threat to the United States. Those statements were omitted from the
> report over Republican objections, resulting in a flagrantly partisan
> document that is "flawed, incomplete and irrelevant," he said.
>
> The committee's final report also focused on efforts by Bush
> appointees at the Pentagon and White House to collect intelligence on
> Iran. The effort included a series of meetings in Rome and Paris that
> featured Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile the CIA had labeled
> as a fabricator based on his role in the Iran-contra affair.
>
> The group kept the CIA in the dark about Manucher's involvement, the
> report said, and as a result the agency never learned about
> "potentially useful and actionable intelligence" gained in a December
> 2001 meeting in Rome with two Iranian intelligence officers. The CIA
> also was prevented from learning of Ghorbanifar's attempts to obtain
> Pentagon funds for covert activities in Iran and otherwise influence
> U.S. government activities, committee members found.
> The new report is the last in a series of Senate reports on the
> intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq war. The first such
> report, released in July 2004, focused on flaws in
> intelligence-gathering and analysis by the U.S. intelligence agencies
> but put off the politically explosive question of whether Bush
> administration officials deliberately distorted or misused the
> information they were given. The final report was delayed as
> committee members clashed over what the report should say and whether
> such a report was still necessary.
> The earlier Senate report, released when Republicans controlled the
> chamber, concluded unanimously that U.S. intelligence agencies had
> botched the task of assessing Iraq's capabilities regarding weapons
> of mass destruction. It said key intelligence reports made
> unwarranted assumptions and overstated what was then known about
> Hussein's weapons programs. The report faulted the CIA and other
> agencies for failing to cultivate reliable informants and for basing
> key assessments on extrapolation and inference.