fossten said:
The people who take responsibility are the people who are outlined in the Silberman/Robb Commission, which goes into detail about the faulty intelligence.
Here are the high points, to save you the trouble.
Below are excerpts from the Report to the President by The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction -- also known as the Silberman-Robb Report -- which make it clear that allegations that intelligence was warped or manipulated are false. Below are some specific findings from the report which came out in March 2005:
(i) "Many observers of the Intelligence Community have expressed concern that Intelligence Community judgments concerning Iraq's purported WMD programs may have been warped by inappropriate political pressure...
The Commission has found no evidence of 'politicization' of the Intelligence Community's assessments concerning Iraq's reported WMD programs. No analytical judgments were changed in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion." -- Intelligence Capabilities Commission Report, pages 187-188.
(ii)
"We looked very closely at that question [Administration pressuring intelligence analysts]. Every member of the commission was sensitive to the number of questions that have been raised with respect to the, what we'll call politicization, or however you want to describe it. And we examined every single instance that had been referred to, in print or otherwise, to see if there was any occasion where a member of the administration or anyone else had asked an analyst or anybody else associated with the intelligence community to change a position that they were taking or whether they felt there was any undo influence, and
we found absolutely no instance." -- Charles S. Robb, Co-Chairman, The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, March 31 press conference.
(iii) "The Intelligence Community’s Iraq assessments were ... riddled with errors. Contrary to what some defenders of the Intelligence Community have since asserted, these errors were not the result of a few harried months in 2002.
Most of the fundamental errors were made and communicated to policymakers well before the now-infamous NIE of October 2002, and were not corrected in the months between the NIE and the start of the war. They were not isolated or random failings. Iraq had been an intelligence challenge at the forefront of U.S. attention for over a decade. It was a known adversary that had already fought one war with the United States and seemed increasingly likely to fight another. But, after ten years of effort, the Intelligence Community still had no good intelligence on the status of Iraq’s weapons programs." -- Intelligence Capabilities Commission Report Overview, page 9.
(iv) "Post-war investigations concluded that Curveball's [the code-name of an Iraqisource] was not influenced by, controlled by, or connected to, the INC [Iraqi National Congress]. In fact, over all, CIA's post-war investigations revealed that INC-related sources had a minimal impact on pre-war assessments." -- Intelligence Capabilities Commission Report Overview, page 108.
(v) "The NIE simply didn't communicate how weak the underlying intelligence was. This was, moreover, a problem that was not limited to the NIE. Our review found that after the publication of the October 2002 NIE but before Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 address to the United Nations,
intelligence officials within the CIA failed to convey to policymakers new information casting serious doubt on the reliability of a human intelligence source known as 'Curveball.' This occurred despite the pivotal role Curveball’s information played in the Intelligence Community’s assessment of Iraq’s biological weapons programs, and in spite of Secretary Powell’s efforts to strip every dubious piece of information out of his proposed speech. In this instance, once again,
the Intelligence Community failed to give policymakers a full understanding of the frailties of the intelligence on which they were relying." -- Intelligence Capabilities Commission Report Overview, pages 10-11.
"Jordan fades back - swish - AND THAT'S THE GAME!!!"
- Jim Carrey
