Senate Intelligence Committee: Bush and Cheney Misled us on Iraq

WASHINGTON -- Claims by U.S. President George W. Bush and other top administration officials before the 2003 invasion of Iraq regarding Baghdad's ties to al Qaeda and its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs were generally not supported by the evidence that the U.S. intelligence community had at the time, according to a major new report by the Senate Intelligence Committee released Thursday.

The long-awaited report, the last in a series published over the past several years by the committee, found that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, in particular, frequently made assertions in the run-up to the war that key intelligence agencies could not substantiate or about which there was substantial disagreement within the intelligence community.

"In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent," the Committee chairman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, said on releasing the 172-page report. "As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed."

"There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence," he added. "But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate."

The Committee also released a second report Thursday on a series of initially secret meetings in Rome and Paris between neo-conservative Pentagon officials and alleged Iranian dissidents, including a notorious Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghobanifar who played a key role in the so-called Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s.

The report found that the meetings, which also included another Iran-Contra player, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), were authorized by then-Deputy National Security Adviser (currently National Security Adviser) Stephen Hadley and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz who, it concluded, failed to keep relevant intelligence agencies and the State Department informed.

"The report found that the clandestine meetings … were inappropriate and mishandled from beginning to end" and that "senior Defense Department officials cut short internal investigations of the meetings … " after they became known, a press release issued by the committee stated.

Both reports were signed by 10 members of the Committee, including two Republicans, Sens. Olympia Snowe and Chuck Hagel. Five members -- all Republicans -- issued a strong dissent, arguing that the minority had been "entirely cut out of the process" and charging that the Democrats had "twisted policy makers' statements and cherry-picked the intelligence in order to reach their misleading conclusions." The ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, called the report "political theater".

The timing of the report's release, as well as its conclusions, however, is likely to fuel the ongoing political debate over the Iraq war at a critical moment in the presidential election campaign. This is particularly so with the securing of the Democratic nomination by Sen. Barack Obama, whose outspoken opposition to invading Iraq before the war is seen as a major reason for his victory over Sen. Hillary Clinton, who voted in favor of the Congressional authorization to go to war in the fall of 2002.

Obama now faces Republican Sen. John McCain, who, as honorary chairman of the Committee to Liberate Iraq in the run-up to the invasion, not only endorsed the claims that were being made by Bush and Cheney at the time, but also helped to propagate them.

The new reports also tend to bolster the charges made in a new book by former White House spokesman Scott McClellan, a long-time Bush aide who was considered part of the president's inner circle during the same period.