From the The New York Times:
The final report of a presidential commission studying American intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein’s political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles. …
The report also proposes broad changes in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that go well beyond the legislation passed by Congress late last year that set up a director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 agencies.
Those recommendations are likely to figure prominently in April in the confirmation hearings of John D. Negroponte, …
The report “includes what one senior official called “a hearty condemnation” of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.”
Also noteworthy: The 400-page unclassified report, reports the The New York Times, devotes little space to North Korea and Iran, “the two nations now posing the largest potential nuclear challenge to the United States and its allies.” That discussion is reserved for the classified version, and is highly critical:
The classified version of the report is particularly critical of American failures to penetrate Iran’s program, and notes how much of the assessment of the size of North Korea’s suspected nuclear arsenal is based on what one official called “educated extrapolation.” Officials and outside experts who were interviewed by the commission or its staff said they had been asked at length about the absence of reliable human intelligence sources inside both countries.
The commission’s conclusions, if made public, may only fuel the arguments now heard in Beijing, Seoul and the capitals of Europe that an intelligence system that so misjudged Iraq cannot be fully trusted when it comes to the assessments of how much progress has been made by North Korea and Iran. …
And, remember those “unmanned aerial vehicles”?
The report particularly ridicules the conclusion that Mr. Hussein’s fleet of “unmanned aerial vehicles,” which had very limited flying range, posed a major threat. All of those assertions were repeated by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials in the prelude to the war. To this day, Mr. Cheney has never backed away from his claim, repeated last year, that the “mobile laboratories” were probably part of a secret biological weapons program. …
