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A summary of the Senate report on CIA intelligence in Iraq
July 9, 2004

A summary of the facts and conclusions contained in the Senate Intellligence Committee report on intelligence leading up to the war with Iraq.

Washington D.C. —

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

-- The war in Iraq was based on faulty, inaccurate or overstated CIA analyses.

-- Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, vice chairman of the committee, says Congress would not have authorized the Iraq war if they knew what they know now.

-- The CIA correctly determined that there was no evidence to prove a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida or Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

-- Otherwise, the President and Congress were given bad information from which to base decisions on Iraq.

-- The CIA abused its position in the intelligence community, hording some information.

-- There were intelligence failures in almost every aspect related to Iraq and potential weapons of mass destruction. -- CIA director George Tenet should have personally reviewed President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, which contained references to Iraq which were later discredited.

-- Rockefeller says the problems rank "among the most destructive intelligence failures" in the history of the nation.

SPECIFIC REPORT FINDINGS

-- The following are the conclusions highlighted by committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-KS.

-- 1. Key findings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in 2002 were overstated or unsupported.

-- The following CIA conclusions in a 2002 report were found to be untrue or overstated:

- Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear program.

- Iraq has chemical and biological weapons.

- Iraq was developing an unmanned aerial vehicle which could deliver biological agents.

- Iraq's biological weapons programs are active, and larger than before the Gulf War.

-- 2. On Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, there were severe shortcomings in every aspect of human intelligence work. The committee found the CIA had no human intelligence sources in Iraq after U-N inspectors left in 1998.

-- 3. The intelligence community didn't adequately explain the uncertainties behind their conclusions.

-- 4. The intelligence community suffered from "group think", leading managers and analysts to interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusive.

-- 5. There was a detrimental "layering effect", something the report calls the "intelligence assumption train." That means analysts used faulty conclusions or information from the past to produce more inaccurate conclusions.

-- 6. Managers failed to challenge assumptions or encourage analysts to do so.

-- 7. The CIA abused its position in the intelligence community. Specifically, the agency blocked important intelligence from being shared with other agencies. That problem extended to terrorism analysis.

-- 8. There was no evidence that the CIA made conclusions based on political pressure.

WHAT HAPPENS NOW

-- The leaders of the Senate committee behind the report are calling for significant reform.

-- They say the nation must revamp its intelligence community and do it as quickly as possible.

REPORT INFORMATION

-- The full report is 511 pages long.

-- It contains more than 100 conclusions about U.S. intelligence on Iraq before the war.

-- The Senate Intelligence Committee spent a year investigating and writing the report.

-- The report initially was expected to be released last year.

-- It was delayed for months because of disputes -- including internal committee debates about the review's scope, and the CIA's initial proposal to classify roughly 40 percent of the report.

-- About 20 percent of the final report is being withheld from the public for those reasons.

(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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