The Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON – Not only was the government “dead wrong” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, officials still know “disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors,” a special commission warned Thursday.

Moreover, U.S. intelligence agencies remain ill-prepared to confront the threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, said the panel appointed by President Bush, urging sweeping changes well beyond those Congress ordered last year.

“There is no more important intelligence mission than understanding the worst weapons that our enemies possess, and how they intend to use them against us,” said the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Bush called the findings a “sharp critique” of the nation’s spy agencies.

The president, whose 2003 decision to invade Iraq relied on an assessment that Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons, vowed Thursday to follow through on the panel’s recommendations to better coordinate the varied intelligence agencies.

“The threats today are unprecedented,” Bush said at a White House news conference, flanked by the commission’s two chairmen. “The lives of our citizens are at stake.”

The bipartisan panel called for a major reorganization within the Justice Department and FBI to bring together disparate intelligence and counterterrorism missions. The commissioners, who made 74 recommendations, also urged broader powers for the new national intelligence director, whose job is to oversee the 15 intelligence agencies scattered across six Cabinet departments.

“We will correct what needs to be fixed,” Bush said. White House officials said much of it wouldn’t require congressional approval.

Congress and foreign policy analysts welcomed the report, whose stark conclusions about intelligence failures echo earlier findings by the Sept. 11 commission, the Senate Intelligence Committee and others.

Some Democrats complained the commission should have delved more deeply into questions whether Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney or other officials hyped anti-Iraq evidence or pressured intelligence officers to reach certain conclusions.

“The commission did not address how the administration used the information to take the country to war,” said Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J.

Commissioners said their charge was to learn exactly how and why things went wrong with Iraq. The report did say that no political pressure caused analysts in the weeks leading to the war to “skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.”

“That said, it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom,” the report found.

The commission issued a veiled warning about ongoing intelligence shortcomings regarding the nuclear ambitions of North Korea, Iran and terrorist networks.

One-third of the 601-page report concerned intelligence failures with Iraq, which the commission attributed largely to bad sources, faulty assumptions and ignored warnings.

Allegations of nuclear weapons grew from disclosure that Iraq obtained high-strength aluminum tubes that could be used to develop highly enriched uranium, fuel for a bomb. The report said analysts discounted evidence that the tubes could also be used for conventional rockets that Iraq was entitled to build.

Agencies also put too much stock in reports that Iraq also solicited Niger for ore and yellowcake that could be used to enrich uranium, despite signs that the evidentiary documents were forged. Bush cited the Niger allegation in his 2003 State of the Union.

Claims of biological weapons came largely from a single source known as “Curveball” – an Iraqi defector in Germany – despite signs of fabrication, the report said

Another informant, who said Iraq had mobile weapons labs, was also found to be a fabricator, but his claims found their way into pre-war United Nations testimony by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The report noted that before the first Gulf War of 1991, officials underestimated the strides Iraq had made in its nuclear program.

That experience, coupled with Saddam’s actual use of chemical weapons in the 1980s, influenced the way officials evaluated his regime over the past dozen years.

“The intelligence community operated on presumptions or assumptions based on what they had seen in 1991,” said Laurence Silberman, the commission’s co-chairman.

Silberman, a federal appeals judge appointed to the bench by President Reagan, headed the commission with Charles Robb, former Democratic governor and senator from Virginia.

Commissioners pointed out that the intelligence agencies have achieved successes, including information about Libya’s now-abandoned WMD program.

Moreover, U.S. intelligences agencies weren’t the only ones who believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; most global spy agencies agreed.

“In the end,” the report said, “it was the United States that put its credibility on the line, making this one of the most public – and most damaging – intelligence failures in recent American history.”

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