The Intelligence Community Gets Theirs
WASHINGTON - In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows "disturbingly little" about the threats posed by many of the nation's most dangerous adversaries.
The commission called for dramatic change to prevent future failures. It outlined 74 recommendations and said President Bush could implement most of them without action by Congress. It urged Bush to give broader powers to John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, to deal with challenges to his authority from the CIA, Defense Department or other elements of the nation's 15 spy agencies.
It also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office.
The report was the latest somber assessment of intelligence shortfalls that a series of investigative panels have made since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Numerous investigations have concluded that spy agencies had serious intelligence failures before the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks against the United States.
One of the biggest fallacies perpetuated by the anti-war crowd is that President Bush "lied" about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but to anyone with a modicum of common sense the truth of the matter was not that the President lied but rather that he was provided with less-than-adequate intelligence on which to base his decisions.
I've long felt that focusing all of the criticism over the WMD issue on the President has been hurtful to this country in that it ignores the intelligence failures themselves. The agents at the CIA and other agencies flat-out dropped the ball on Iraqi intelligence yet the vast majority of criticism over the matter has been directed at the President. If more of the criticism had been directed at the true source of the problem, America's intelligence community, some of the reforms described in the article above may have been quicker in coming.
