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UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL Members of the presidential commission that examined U.S. intelligence failures told White House officials that they would resign en masse if President Bush did not ensure the nation's spy agencies cooperated with their inquiry -- and had to repeat the threat more than once. Laurence H. Silberman, the federal judge who was co-chairman of the inquiry, said he told officials, "If we did not get support from the White House at any time we ran into any difficulties, I and others would resign." Click to learn more... "I did occasionally have to remind the White House of...

The conclusions of last week's report by the U.S. presidential commission assessing the intelligence failures of the Iraq war make clear that the United States dramatically overestimated Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction capabilities. American intelligence, said the commission, led by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Chuck Robb, was "dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." Critics of Bush administration's foreign policy at home and abroad may hope that this extraordinary verdict will limit future U.S. military operations against other rogue regimes, given the risk of a similar, costly mistake. In...

Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr.--a conservative Republican from North Carolina--voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. So it jarred all the more yesterday when Jones turned his fury on Richard N. Perle, the Pentagon adviser who provided the Bush administration with brainpower for the Iraq war. Jones, who said he has signed more than 900 condolence letters to kin of fallen soldiers, pronounced himself "incensed" with Perle. "It is just amazing to me how we as a Congress were told we had to remove this man..... but the reason we were given was not accurate," Jones told Perle...

presidential commission investigating the intelligence debacle that preceded the Iraq invasion reported yesterday that the damage done to US credibility would "take years to undo". American intelligence was described by the report as being in chaos, often paralysed by the rivalry of 15 different spy agencies and affected by unchallenged assumptions about Baghdad's supposed weapons of mass destruction. The incompetence described in the report occasionally descends into farce, particularly over an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, whose fabricated tales about mobile biological laboratories and their influence on US decision-makers were reminiscent of Graham Greene's accidental spy in Our Man in Havana....

If you recall, the MSM, relying on unnamed sources repeatedly tarred the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmed Chalabi with being the source of false intelligence information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Leaving aside for the moment that those sources undoubtedly were located within the agencies that the Commission found responsible for the bad intelligence, it did clear the INC of these false claims--not that you'll know, unless you take the time to read the Commission Report. Page 108 of the Robb-Silverman Report states: "In fact, over all, CIA's post-war investigations revealed that INC-related sources had a minimal impact on...

Commission of the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. [PDF & HTML Files at Link]

WASHINGTON - President Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction will castigate U.S. intelligence agencies for their continued failure to share information after numerous reforms aimed at improving coordination, federal officials said Tuesday. One official familiar with the commission's workings, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the report also goes into great detail on why prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs turned out to be flawed. The report is scheduled to be released Thursday. The report examines factors that might have led to errors, the official said, such as whether policy-makers were seeking preconceived conclusions, whether foreign intelligence agencies had...

Washington, DC, Mar. 29 (UPI) -- A presidential commission's report on U.S. intelligence about Iraqi weapons says the CIA missed and misinterpreted key data.

WASHINGTON, March 28 - The final report of a presidential commission studying American intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles, according to officials who have seen the report's executive summary. The report also proposes broad changes in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that go well beyond the legislation passed by Congress late last year that set up a director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 agencies. Those recommendations are...

A report from the White House intelligence panel, expected to be unveiled this week, will detail how three years after 9/11, many of the problems within the nation's intelligence agencies that were blamed for the failure to detect the hijacking plot remain today, Newsweek reports in the current issue. The panel was originally created last year to examine how U.S. intelligence could have been so embarrassingly wrong about Saddam Hussein's nonexistent WMD arsenal. But the president gave it a broader mission to look at ongoing problems inside the intelligence community as a whole. Its report is the first major assessment...

A presidential commission examining U.S. intelligence failures related to weapons of mass destruction has fired an FBI agent for improperly supplying a classified CIA report to FBI headquarters, The Washington Times has learned.     The incident was viewed by officials close to the commission as an attempt by the FBI to influence the work of the panel, formed in the aftermath of the Iraq war to look at intelligence related to Iraq and other states involved in illicit weapons acquisition. [snip]     The female FBI agent, who was assigned to work for the commission, improperly removed a highly classified CIA report...

WASHINGTON - A presidential commission investigating weapons of mass destruction is highly critical of U.S. intelligence agencies' performance on Iran, North Korea and Libya and attempts to lay out what went wrong on Iraq, according to individuals familiar with the findings. None of the 15 agencies is expected to be singled out as doing an exemplary job of collecting or assessing intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. The report from the nine-member panel led by Republican Laurence Silberman and Democrat Charles Robb is expected next week. "I don't get the impression that one (agency) is better than the other," said...

WASHINGTON (AP) - In its first official meeting Wednesday, the president's commission investigating flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction heard from David Kay, the former Iraq weapons inspector whose criticism helped drive the panel's creation. Kay, along with about a dozen other experts, appeared before the commission in a closed seven-hour session to brief the nine commissioners as they begin sorting out the quality of U.S. intelligence on the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. President Bush formed the commission - called the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction...

<p>An independent commission created by President Bush to examine U.S. intelligence capabilities with particular focus on weapons of mass destruction convenes its first series of closed-door meetings this week.</p> <p>The commission is headed by former Sen. Charles S. Robb, Virginia Democrat, and appeals court Judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican. Members will be briefed Wednesday and Thursday by intelligence specialists at the commission's offices in Crystal City.</p>

Former President Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore have declined an invitation by the Independent Commission Investigating the 9/11 Attacks to testify in public, after reportedly agreeing to do so earlier this month, and will instead be interviewed privately. Only last week, the former president and vice president had agreed to testify publicy, with the Associated Press reporting on March 2, "Clinton and Gore have consented to public questioning without a time constraint." By contrast, the AP said that President Bush and Vice President Cheney "have agreed only to private, separate, one-hour meetings with the commission's chairman and vice...

JACKSON, Miss. - John Kerry on Sunday accused President Bush of "stonewalling" separate inquiries into the events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks, as well as into the intelligence that suggested Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of Mass Destruction Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, endorsed complaints by some members of a federal commission investigating the attacks that Bush was resisting their efforts to get documents and question witnesses. "Why is this administration stonewalling and resisting the investigation into what happened and why we had the greatest security failure in the history of our country?" Kerry said...

JACKSON, Miss. - John Kerry on Sunday accused President Bush of "stonewalling" separate inquiries into the events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks, as well as into the intelligence that suggested Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, parried complaints by members of a federal commission investigating the attacks that Bush was resisting their efforts to get documents and question witnesses. "Why is this administration stonewalling and resisting the investigation into what happened and why we had the greatest security failure in the history of our country?" Kerry...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is pushing the White House to give subpoena power to the independent commission President Bush created last month to investigate intelligence operations. The administration has turned him down, but the senator is refusing to take no for an answer. The clash reignites a bitterness first sparked when Bush and McCain fought for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000. Bush initially opposed creating the commission, but, under pressure from Democrats and some Republicans, he signed an executive order Feb. 6 to form the nine-member commission. But the president defined the scope of its inquiry narrowly, appointed its...

During an anti-George-Bush rant, a friend demanded, "What about those weapons of mass destruction?" Oddly enough, a year and a half ago, she (along with a lot of other folk) had refused to make a similar demand of Saddam Hussein, Iraq's former dictator. Indeed, it was Saddam's failure to answer the very same question over a period of more than a decade that led to his fall from power and his cowering before American soldiers in a rat hole on the outskirts of Tikrit. Unlike my friend, I don't believe our President misled this nation as to the existence of...

Democratic Whip Harry Reid of Nevada, who each day roams the Senate floor protecting the minority party and pummeling George W. Bush, showed up Wednesday carrying a paperback book. It was David Brock's Blinded by the Right, and Reid used it as a blunt weapon against President Bush's choice of Judge Laurence Silberman as Republican co-chairman of the bipartisan commission to investigate Iraq intelligence failures. Reid cited at length Brock's screed against the author's erstwhile conservative colleagues, including his former mentor, Judge Silberman. Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, another Senate Democratic leader, on cue showed up to join the...