New Report Details Errors Before War

Washington Post
September 9, 2006

The long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee report released yesterday sheds new light on why U.S. intelligence agencies provided inaccurate prewar information about Saddam Hussein and his weapons programs, including details on how Iraqi exiles who fabricated or exaggerated their stories were accepted as truthful because they passed Pentagon lie detector tests. The two newly declassified chapters of the report fueled political accusations yesterday that the Bush administration lied to justify invading Iraq.

The report notes that a DIA official who knew that the source was unreliable sat in on two meetings in which the mobile labs information was incorporated into the speech Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered in February 2003 to the U.N. Security Council, but that the official did not realize the information was based solely on the word of the untrustworthy source.

One surprising conclusion from the CIA retrospective is that the agency now believes that aggressive U.N. inspections in Iraq in 1991 after the Persian Gulf War led Hussein to what it describes as a "fateful decision." He covertly dismantled and destroyed the undeclared nuclear, chemical and biological facilities, materials and actual weapons he had put together in the preceding decade -- along with "the records that could have verified that unilateral destruction."

As a result, there was no proof in 2002 and 2003 when the Iraqis claimed they had no weapons of mass destruction, and Hussein could not demonstrate he was in basic, if not complete, compliance with U.N. resolutions. Noncompliance with the Security Council's October resolution was the main U.S. public rationale for the invasion of Iraq.