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Senate report clears whitehouse blames cia { July 8 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5395999/http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5395999/
NBC: CIA to be cited for ‘series of failures’
Lawmaker assails Iraq intelligence report
NBC, MSNBC and news services
Updated: 10:54 p.m. ET July 08, 2004
WASHINGTON - A Senate Intelligence Committee report to be released on Friday will sharply criticize the Central Intelligence Agency for pre-war intelligence failures in Iraq, but a senior Senate Democrat charged Thursday that it fails to address evidence suggesting that the Bush administration knowingly exaggerated a purported link between al-Qaida and toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
And while the White House will be spared from criticism in Friday’s report, excerpts of the document obtained by NBC News cite the CIA for a "series of failures, particularly in analytic tradecraft” that “led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence” on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The report will criticize leadership at the CIA, including the agency’s director George Tenet, whose resignation is effective Sunday. The CIA, the report says, "in several significant instances, abused its unique position in the intelligence community" by not sharing information on Iraq's weapons.
As to those false claims about Iraq's nuclear imports in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, the report says Tenet "should have taken the time to read the State of the Union speech and fact check it himself."
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said in a statement that the committee’s report “is an accurate, hard-hitting and well-deserved critique of the CIA,” but charged that it avoids the critical question of the administration’s possible pre-war exaggerations regarding an al-Qaida link to the Iraqi government.
Prague connection discounted
As an example of the sort of information he said was not included in the report, Levin cited a CIA statement he received this week saying that there is no credible information that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech Republic city of Prague in April 2001. In fact, the report concludes, CIA analysts “are increasingly skeptical that such a meeting occurred.”
“(The finding) demonstrates that it was the administration, not the CIA, that exaggerated the relations between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida," Levin said at a news conference.
Intelligence suggesting such a meeting was cited repeatedly by administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, as supporting the assertion of such a link.
Cheney most recently said in a June 17 interview with CNBC that the meeting between Atta and the Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague “couldn’t be ruled out.”
But Levin pointed to published reports that the CIA had doubts that the meeting took place as early as December 2001. He also cited a report by the independent Sept. 11 commission stating that information gathered by the FBI placed Atta in the United States during the week of the alleged meeting.
The administration had no immediate response to Levin’s charge. But NBC News has learned that excerpts of the report specifically cite the CIA for critical lapses of action or judgment.
Battle with White House
Democrats on the Intelligence Committee lost their battle to have Friday’s report incorporate the administration’s statements about pre-war intelligence. Instead, a follow-up report examining White House actions will be completed after the November election.
The report will say that intelligence analysts did not question the long-held belief that Iraq had banned weapons of mass destruction and saw ambiguous information as supporting that view, a Senate source told Reuters this week.
The report was also expected to criticize intelligence agencies for using unreliable and inadequate sources.
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