US President George W. Bush and his top policymakers misstated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s links to terrorism and ignored doubts among intelligence agencies about Iraq’s arms programs as they made a case for war, the Senate intelligence committee reported on Thursday.
The report shows an administration that “led the nation to war on false premises,” said the committee’s Democratic chairman, Senator John Rockefeller. Several Republicans on the committee protested its findings as a “partisan exercise.”
The committee studied major speeches by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials in advance of the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and compared key assertions with intelligence available at the time.
Statements that Iraq had a partnership with al-Qaeda were wrong and unsupported by intelligence, the report said.
It said that Bush’s and Cheney’s assertions that Saddam was prepared to arm terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction for attacks on the US contradicted available intelligence.
Such assertions had a strong resonance with a US public, still reeling after al-Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US. Polls showed that many Americans believed Iraq played a role in the attacks, even long after Bush acknowledged in September 2003 that there was no evidence Saddam was involved.
The report also said administration prewar statements on Iraq’s weapons programs were backed up in most cases by available US intelligence, but officials failed to reflect internal debate over those findings, which proved wrong.
The long-delayed Senate study supported previous reports and findings that the administration’s main cases for war — that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was spreading them to terrorists — were inaccurate and deeply flawed.
“These reports are about holding the government accountable and making sure these mistakes never happen again,” Rockefeller said.
“A statement to Congress by then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the Iraqi government hid weapons of mass destruction in facilities underground was not backed up by intelligence information, the report said. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said Rumsfeld’s comments should be investigated further, but he stopped short of urging a criminal probe.
The committee voted 10-5 to approve the report, with two Republican lawmakers supporting it. Senator Christopher Bond and three other Republican panel members denounced the study in an attached dissent.
“The committee finds itself once again consumed with political gamesmanship,” the Republicans said. The effort to produce the report “has indeed resulted in a partisan exercise.”
They said, however, that the report demonstrated that Bush administration statements were backed by intelligence and “it was the intelligence that was faulty.”
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: “We had the intelligence that we had, fully vetted, but it was wrong. We certainly regret that and we’ve taken measures to fix it.”
To Rockefeller, the problem was concealing information that would have undermined the case for war.
“We might have avoided this catastrophe,” he said.
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