Iraq Intelligence Commission - Findings

Findings

Regarding Iraq, the Commission concluded that the Intelligence Community was wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and that this constituted a major intelligence failure.

The Intelligence Community’s performance in assessing Iraq’s pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure. The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers. —Unclassified version of the commission's report, p. 46

The Commission's report described systemic analytical, collection, and dissemination flaws that led to the intelligence community's erroneous assessments about Iraq's alleged WMD programs. Chief among these flaws were "an analytical process that was driven by assumptions and inferences rather than data", failures by certain agencies to gather all relevant information and analyze fully information on purported centrifuge tubes, insufficient vetting of key sources, particularly the source "Curveball," and somewhat overheated presentation of data to policymakers.

The 601-page document detailed many U.S. intelligence failures and identified intelligence breakdowns in dozens of cases. Some of the conclusions reached by the report were:

• the report notes in several places that the commission's mandate did not allow it "to investigate how policy makers used the intelligence they received from the Intelligence Community on Iraq's weapons programs,"

• One of the main and crucial intelligence sources for the case for regime change in Iraq was an informant named Curveball. Curveball had never been interviewed by American intelligence until after the war and was instead handled exclusively by the German Intelligence Agencies which regarded his statements as unconvincing. An October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq "has" biological weapons was "based almost exclusively on information obtained" from Curveball, according to the report.

• Information about aluminum tubes to be used as centrifuges in a nuclear weapons program were found by the commission to be used for conventional rockets.

• The Niger Yellowcake scandal was due to American intelligence believing "transparently forged documents" purporting to show a contract between the countries. There were "flaws in the letterhead, forged signatures, misspelled words, incorrect titles for individuals and government entities".

• While there were many reports that Curveball was actually the cousin of one of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) top aides. Bush's investigative report while discovering that at least two INC defectors were fabricators, but said it was "unable to uncover any evidence that the INC or any other organization was directing Curveball."