The latest report was focused on comparing statements made by top
administration officials, particularly Bush and Cheney, between August 2002 and the actual invasion in March 2003 with intelligence reports that were available to them at the time.
It found that the White House consistently exaggerated ties between al Qaeda and Iraq by repeatedly suggesting or outright asserting that the two forged an operational relationship that included the provision of weapons training and possibly WMD expertise. The report found that these allegations “were not substantiated by the intelligence” at the time they were made. The report also found that the intelligence also contradicted the White House’s assertions that Saddam Hussein “was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attack against the United States.”
And it said that the intelligence community never confirmed the allegation, made repeatedly by Cheney in particular, that one of the 9/11 organisers, Mohammed Atta, met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague several months before the attack.
“The president and his advisors undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the (9/11) attacks to use the war against al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein,” Rockefeller said. “Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises.”
The intelligence community, according to the report, was also considerably more sceptical about the state of Iraq’s chemical weapons programme and especially its alleged nuclear weapons programme than was indicated by top administration officials at the time. Testimony by then-Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the Iraqi government hid WMD in facilities buried deep underground did not reflect any of the intelligence held by the intelligence community at the time.
Graphic from McClatchy
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