Reply #7: Report cites flaws in CIA assessment of Saddam's threat

[emad]

David E. Sanger and Scott Shane, New York Times
March 29, 2005 WMD0329



WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The final report of a presidential commission studying U.S. intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the CIA and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles, according to officials who have seen the report's executive summary.

The report also proposes broad changes in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that go well beyond the legislation passed by Congress late last year creating a director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 intelligence agencies. Those recommendations are likely to figure prominently in the confirmation hearings of John Negroponte, whom the president has nominated to be national intelligence director. Those hearings are scheduled to begin April 12. The report particularly singles out the CIA under its former director, George Tenet, but also includes what one senior official called "a hearty condemnation" of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, two of the largest intelligence agencies.

The unclassified version of the report, which is more than 400 pages long, devotes relatively little space to the holes in American intelligence about North Korea and Iran, the two countries now posing the largest nuclear challenge to the United States and its allies. Most of that discussion appears only in a much longer classified version. In the words of one administration official who has reviewed the classified version, "We don't give Kim Jong Il or the mullahs a window into what we know, and what we don't."

President Bush is expected to receive the report formally on Thursday morning, White House officials said.

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