Monthly Archive for June, 2008

Described in this article of the Huffington Post the U.S. Senate Select Commitee on Intelligence has released a series of reports on intelligence related to Iraq before the war.

The reports show that the Bush administration actively ignored available intelligence to press ahead with an agenda that will ultimately lead to the installment of permanent U.S. military bases in the Middle East.

The reports give examples that there was no intelligence that supported

• statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
• statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
• statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
• statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
• the statement of the Secretary of Defense that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
• repeated statements of the Vice President that the Intelligence Community did confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein concludes:

»Even though the intelligence before the war supported inaccurate statements, the Bush administration distorted the intelligence in order to build its case to go to war. The executive branch released only those findings that supported the argument, did not relay uncertainties, and at times made statements beyond what the intelligence supported.«