CIA slammed for Iraq intelligence
US senators have severely criticised the country's intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA, for the quality of their pre-war information on Iraq.
In a scathing report, the Senate Intelligence Committee says the CIA overstated the threat posed by Iraq.
As a result, the US and its allies went to war based on "flawed" information.
However, the report concluded there was no evidence the Bush administration had tried to coerce or put pressure on officials to adapt their findings.
Global failure
Most of the key judgements about Iraq's WMD programmes "were either overstated or were not supported by the raw intelligence reporting," said the committee's chairman, Republican Senator Pat Roberts.
The intelligence community suffered a "collective group-think", which led analysts to presume that Iraq had active and growing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes and to interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusive, Senator Roberts said.
But the failings were not America's alone.
"It is clear that this group-think also extended to our allies, and to the United Nations, and several other nations as well, all of whom did believe that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programmes. This was a global intelligence failure," he said.
The report said there was no evidence that analysts came under pressure from the White House to deliver certain findings, although some Democrats dissented from this conclusion.
The issue of whether the Bush administration exaggerated the case for war in Iraq is being investigated separately in a report due to be released after the presidential election on 2 November.
The Democrat vice-chairman of the committee, Senator Jay Rockefeller, stressed his party's regret that the whole matter had not been addressed in one inquiry.
"There is simply no question that mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq rank among the most devastating losses and intelligence failures in the history of the nation," he said.
"We in Congress would not have authorised that war. We would not have authorised that war with 75 votes if we knew what we know now." Mr Bush said the report was "useful" in pointing out how the intelligence community failed.
"We need to know. I want to know. I want to know how to make the agencies better," he said during campaigning in Pennsylvania.
'Slam dunk'
The report could have implications for Lord Butler's UK report, to be published in a few days' time, increasing pressure for a strong examination of what happened in British intelligence.
CIA director George Tenet, who steps down on Sunday, was criticised for not personally checking President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.
This contained the allegation - which first surfaced in a UK report and since discredited - that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium from Niger.
On Thursday, Mr Tenet told employees that the American people would judge where intelligence has done well and where the CIA has fallen short.
source: BBC
