Congress Still Torn on Pre-War Intelligence

June 6, 2008— -- The Iraq war is now five years old, but on Capitol Hill, lawmakers are still bickering over whether the flawed intelligence that led to the March 2003 invasion was intentionally mishandled.

The Senate Intelligence Committee wrapped up an exhaustive, four-year inquest into pre-war intelligence when it published on Thursday the final two chapters of an ongoing assessment. Several Republicans on the committee joined with Democrats to ratify the report, which concludes that, in speeches they gave in the run-up to the war, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney said that Saddam Hussein had an active program to seek weapons of mass destruction even though there was available intelligence to refute that claim.

For more about the report, click here. The full report is available on the Intelligence Committee's Web site

While there are new details in the reports today, for anyone who has closely followed the news coverage of the Iraq war, there were no significant new revelations. The Bush administration has acknowledged that the intelligence leading to the Iraq war was flawed, and an internal Pentagon report released last year eviscerated former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans, which was set up in the Pentagon to provide administration officials with intelligence.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the committee has continued to investigate the pre-war intelligence to avoid a repeat of the run-up to the Iraq war in the future.

"The tragic fact is that, on issues of war and peace, which should require the most meticulous and the most precise adherence to the truth, the administration was too often careless with its words, including, in some cases, making presentations that were not substantiated by the available intelligence or, worse, directly contradicted by the available intelligence," said Rockefeller, who later called the administration's activity in the run-up to the war "heinous."

"There is no question that we all relied on flawed intelligence," Rockefeller said Thurday. "But there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully supported by intelligence."