THE US: He saw it coming. When George Tenet announced last month that he would quit after seven years as CIA director, colleagues in the Bush administration professed shock. But it was clear by then to Mr Tenet that he was going to be the fall guy for a massive skewing of intelligence to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq last year, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor in New York
The stark conclusion of the damning 400-page report by the the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued yesterday, is that there was no basis after all for going to war with Saddam Hussein.
The report, some of it blacked out by the CIA, is a scathing condemnation of the US intelligence community for wrongly concluding that Iraq was a danger to the US. Mr Tenet, who once told President Bush that finding evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction would be a "slam dunk", comes out of the report as a director who created an atmosphere under which assumptions used to justify war to the US Congress and American people could not be challenged.
Just before the US-led invasion of Iraq, Mr Tenet told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing: "We will find stockpiles of things he has not declared and weapons he has not declared." The previous October, as Congress debated authorising war, he had provided a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The bipartisan intelligence committee said that after looking at the evidence available to the CIA it concluded that, "most of the key judgments in the estimate were either overstated or were not supported by the underlying intelligence reports" provided to the committee.
The committee practically accuses Mr Tenet of making it all up.
The major key judgment - that Iraq "is reconstituting its nuclear programme" - was not supported by underlying intelligence, the report said. Neither was the judgment that Iraq "has chemical and biological weapons". The judgment that Iraq was developing an "aerial vehicle probably intended to deliver biological weapons agents" was not supported by intelligence. Nor was there evidence to justify the conclusion that "all key aspects - research and development, production and weaponisation of Iraq's offensive biological weapons programmes - are active".
The senators found that in the intelligence community there was a failure to analyse information, poor management, lack of information-sharing and a broken corporate culture. The committee said it found no evidence that the mischaracterisation and exaggeration of intelligence was the result of political pressure. However, it noted that there was pressure on analysts in the form of repeated questioning from the top if it dissented from the "collective assumption" that Iraq possessed WMD.
There were doubts expressed in the intelligence community but the CIA did not explain any of these to Congress as it deliberated giving the President war powers. Sen Pat Roberts, Republican chairman of the committee, said the "intelligence assumption train" became longer as time went by.
No one has been fired for the intelligence misstatements, which formed the basis for Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation at the UN Security Council the month before the war began. Mr Powell has since distanced himself from the case he made. The CIA is also faulted for misreading the meaning of intercepts and satellite photos, for placing too much faith in the claims of defectors, and for dismissing data that did not support preformed conclusions.
Sen Roberts said this "group-think caused the community to interpret ambiguous evidence, such as the procurement of dual-use technology, as conclusive evidence of the existence of WMD programmes".
The CIA was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad had abandoned its weapons programmes, but it failed to give that information to Mr Bush.
Also, Mr Tenet, who was yesterday clearing his desk before retiring with full pension, did not check Mr Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, which contained a precis of American intelligence on Iraq, including the now-discredited reference to Iraq's attempts to obtain uranium in Africa.