US spies got Iraq 'dead wrong'
US spy agencies were ”dead wrong” in most of their judgements about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before the war, a presidential commission said in a scathing report today.
It said the US knows “disturbingly little” about the weapons programmes and the threat posed by many of the nation’s most dangerous adversaries.
The commission called for dramatic change to prevent future failures. It outlined more than 70 recommendations, saying that President George Bush must give John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, broader powers for overseeing 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 unclassified version of the report does not go into significant detail on the intelligence community’s abilities in Iran and North Korea because commissioners did not want to tip the US hand to its leading adversaries.
Those details are included in the classified version.
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