New Senate reports reject Saddam-al Qaeda link
Even before the two long-delayed reports on prewar Iraq intelligence were posted on the Senate Intelligence Committee website this afternoon, drafters from both parties were already condemning them.
The highlight of the first report is the conclusion that Saddam Hussein never had a relationship with the now deceased al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi or any other al Qaeda militants, despite some Bush administration suggestions to the contrary. In fact, Saddam's regime mounted a large, but unsuccessful, effort to nab Zarqawi when he was in Baghdad before the war. U.S. intelligence agencies overestimated the ability of Saddam's intelligence agencies to cast a dragnet in Baghdad.
The rest of the report confirms the panel's earlier findings about the mistakes made in assessing Saddam's (nonexistent) arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
In the second report, the committee accused the controversial Iraqi opposition politician (and onetime Pentagon favorite) Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress of trying to mislead the U.S. intelligence community about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction before the invasion. It also documents mishandling of reports from INC-affiliated sources by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other agencies. In one example, even after an INC-related source was determined to be a fabricator, reports based on his debriefings were never recalled. This meant that intelligence officials continued to cite his information in key intelligence reports well after his unreliability was well known. He was even one of the sources that Secretary of State Colin Powell cited in his infamous United Nations speech making the case for war.
Even though Republicans are a majority on the committee, several from the party immediately complained that the report was overstated for political reasons. At the same time, Democrats accused the majority of dragging its heels on the three remaining portions of the committee's investigation into how prewar intelligence was used by the Bush administration to make its case for war.