WASHINGTON — In a long-delayed report, the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday rebuked President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for making prewar claims — particularly that Iraq had close ties to al-Qaeda — that were not supported by available intelligence.
The report, which was opposed by most Republicans on the panel, accuses the president and other members of his administration of repeatedly exaggerating evidence of an al-Qaeda connection to take advantage of the charged climate after Sept. 11, 2001. It amounts to the most pointed reproach to date of the Bush administration’s use of intelligence to build the case for the Iraq war.
But the document stops short of calling for any follow-up investigation or sanction.
“In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent,” said Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., chairman of the intelligence panel. “Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.”
In a second report, the committee provided new details on clandestine, post-Sept. 11 meetings between Defense Department officials and Iranian dissidents seeking support for a plan to overthrow the Islamic regime. In that document, the committee faulted national-security adviser Stephen Hadley and others for their roles in an effort that was hidden from the CIA.
The committee’s 170-page report on the Bush administration’s case for war reads like a catalog of erroneous claims. The document represents the most detailed assessment to date of whether those assertions were backed by classified intelligence reports available to senior officials at the time.
The report largely exonerates Bush administration officials for some of their prewar assertions, including claims that Baghdad had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing a nuclear bomb. Although those claims were subsequently proved to be wildly inaccurate, the report noted, they were largely consistent with U.S. intelligence at the time.
But the report said the Bush administration veered away from its own intelligence community’s conclusions in two key areas: on Iraq’s relationship with al-Qaeda, and whether it would be difficult to pacify Iraq after a U.S. invasion.
Statements made during dozens of speeches and interviews before the war created the impression that Baghdad and al-Qaeda had forged a partnership. But the report concluded such assertions “were not substantiated by the intelligence” shown to senior officials at the time.
The idea that Saddam Hussein had provided chemical- and biological-weapons training to al-Qaeda hinged on intelligence from a source who soon was discredited, for example.
Bush officials strayed even further from the evidence when suggesting that Hussein was prepared to provide weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda terrorist groups — a linchpin in the case for war.
In October 2002, for example, Bush warned in a key speech in Cincinnati that “secretly, and without fingerprints, (Hussein) could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists or help them develop their own.”
The threat was repeated frequently in the run-up to war but was “contradicted by available intelligence information,” the committee said.
On postwar prospects, the report contrasted the rosy scenarios conjured by Cheney and others with more sober intelligence warnings that were being presented to senior officials.
Cheney’s prediction that U.S. forces would “be greeted as liberators” was at odds with reports from the CIA as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency, which warned nearly a year earlier that invading U.S. forces would face serious opposition from “the Baathists, the Jihadists and Arab nationalists who oppose any U.S. occupation of Iraq.”
