Thursday, March 31, 2005


Yahoo! News - Panel: Agencies 'Dead Wrong' on Iraq WMDs
Passing the buck and the blame. Wonder what Richard Clarke has to say about this. Seems to me he said that this administration cherry-picked the intelligence to fit their agenda. Now they want to point fingers at the system in general and, of course, grab more power.

WASHINGTON - In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows "disturbingly little" about the weapons programs and threats posed by many of the nation's most dangerous adversaries.

The commission called for dramatic change to prevent future failures. It outlined more than 70 recommendations, saying that President Bush must give John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, broader powers for overseeing the nation's 15 spy agencies.

It also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office.

The unclassified version of the report does not go into significant detail on the intelligence community's abilities in Iran and North Korea because commissioners did not want to tip the U.S. hand to its leading adversaries. Those details are included in the classified version.

The commission was formed by Bush a year ago to look at why U.S. spy agencies mistakenly concluded that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, one of the administration's main justifications for invading in March 2003.

"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the commission said in a report to the president. "This was a major intelligence failure."

So, will we be issuing apologies anytime soon? You know, to all the families of the people we killed? To the countries that spent money and lives in this effort? No? My guess is that we will continue to justify our actions with the "spreading freedom" mantra.

One good thing is that this might keep our happy asses from acting anywhere else for the time being. We have absolutely zero credibility, and we are admitting it.