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Links
"Director
of Censored Intelligence"
by John Prados
TomPaine.com
October 12, 2005
"CIA
review faults prewar plans"
by John Diamond
USA Today
October 12, 2005
"Report
Says White House Ignored C.I.A. on Iraq Chaos"
by Douglas Jehl
New York Times
October 13, 2005
Related
Postings
State
Department experts warned CENTCOM before Iraq war about lack of
plans for post-war Iraq security
Planning
for post-Saddam regime change began as early as October 2001
CIA
Whites Out Controversial Estimate on Iraq Weapons
Main Subject of Today's Senate Intelligence Report
Remains Largely Secret
The
Saddam Hussein Sourcebook
Declassified secrets from the U.S.-Iraq relationship
Eyes
on Saddam
U.S. overhead imagery of Iraq
Shaking
Hands with Saddam Hussein
The U.S. tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984
Iraq
and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Operation
Desert Storm: Ten Years After
Documents shed light on role of intelligence, stealth technology
and space systems in the Gulf War
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Washington, D.C.,
October 13, 2005 - The White House disregarded intelligence
projections on post-Saddam Iraq according to a newly-declassified
CIA report, "Intelligence
and Analysis on Iraq: Issues for the Intelligence Community,"
posted today on the website of the National Security Archive.
"In an ironic twist," the report finds,
"the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence
(the weapons program), where the analysis was wrong, but apparently
paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political
issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right."
The report, from July 2004, is the third of three
prepared by a group of intelligence experts led by Richard J. Kerr,
a former deputy director of central intelligence, to examine the
U.S. Intelligence Community's assessments in the months before the
U.S. invasion. The first two reports remain classified despite the
fact that many of their key findings are summarized in the July
report and in unclassified reports produced by the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence and the Commission
on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding
Weapons of Mass Destruction.
The Kerr report also identifies a number of weaknesses
in the Intelligence Community's analytical products, particularly
the October
2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraqi
weapons programs, which the report says was prepared "under
an unusually tight time constraint" and was "the product
of three separate drafters, drawing from a mixed bag of analytic
product." The October 2002 NIE was at the center of Bush administration
claims about Iraq's weapons programs in the prewar period.
The report also finds that intelligence analysts were
under constant pressure to find "links between Saddam and [al-Qa'ida]"
causing them to take a "purposely aggressive approach"
to the issue, "conducting exhaustive and repetitive searches
for such links." No such ties were ever found, however, and
"the Intelligence Community remained firm in its assessment
that no operational or collaborative relationship existed."
The Kerr report was the subject of articles in USA
Today and TomPaine.com
on October 12 and is featured in an article by Douglas Jehl in today's
New
York Times. The text of the report was published
this month with an edited introduction in the CIA's Studies
in Intelligence journal (Vol. 49, No. 3). The complete, unedited
version of the report was declassified in response to a Freedom
of Information Act request and appeal by National Security Archive
senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson.
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