Intelligence Commission Wants Dramatic Change

The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction gave the president its 618-page report yesterday, along with a three-page introductory letter that says enough to cause worry. Co-Chaired by former US Senator Chuck Robb (D-VA) and former US Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman (who also served in the Nixon and Ford administrations), the commission reported that the US intelligence community was "dead wrong" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- which didn't exist after the 1990s. Moreover, the commission says the US still knows "disturbingly little about the weapons programs and even less about the intentions of many of our most dangerous adversaries." Fortunately, US foreign policy these days is faith-based and, therefore, needn't rely on knowledge.

Not surprisingly, the commission believes that "the best hope for preventing future failures is dramatic change." Along those lines, the commission urges a few moves in its letter and 74 in its report. For instance, the president should give the new Director of National Intelligence powers and support in taming the CIA and Pentagon intelligence agencies (one doubts Mr. Bush would stand up to Field Marshall von Rumsfeld though). Another suggestion is to bring the FBI "all the way into the Intelligence Community," which makes sense but will annoy civil libertarians no end. The commission also says the president should demand more of the intelligence community, but Mr. Bush lacks the intellectual curiosity and insists on "loyalty" to such a degree that minority report thinking is anathema to him and his administration. Finally, the President's Daily Brief should be rethought, but this seems to be a case of the workman blaming his tools. Perhaps a little more time going beyond the briefing in Washington and a little less brush-clearing in Crawford, Texas, is in order.

Even without the dysfunctional Bush foreign policy team, the US intelligence operations in the run-up to the Iraq war were poor. And the failings are apparent in the report. The introductory letter says

We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure. Its principal causes were the Intelligence Community's inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather, and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions, rather than good evidence. On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude.

After a thorough review, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. What the intelligence professionals told you about Saddam Hussein's programs was what they believed. They were simply wrong.