I thought everyone agreed that the intelligence was wrong, omfg it is everywhere in the news, why are you so blind to the truth...
WMD intelligence wrong, says Kay
"We were all wrong," said Kay
The former senior US weapons inspector, David Kay, has said intelligence that Iraq possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons was false.
Mr Kay, who resigned last week, told a Senate committee in Washington that failures had become apparent in US intelligence-gathering capability.
He denied that US intelligence had been distorted by government pressure in the run-up to last year's US-led war.
"It turns out we were all wrong," he said, "and that is most disturbing."
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For America's outgoing Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet, yesterday's Senate report makes agonising reading. A masochistic colleague would find solace if he read to the end. Buried at the back of its 500-odd pages there is an uncritical paragraph on the CIA's record in sharing its findings.
Unfortunately, as the report makes clear, its findings were catastrophically flawed as indeed was just about everything the CIA did in the countdown to the war. The report paints a devastating picture of amateurism and insouciance in the CIA's operation, from its collection of information, to its analysis, and reliance on uncorroborated sources and false information.
Pat Roberts, the Republican who heads the Senate intelligence committee, set the tone in his opening remarks introducing the report.
"One fact is now clear," he said. "Before the war the United States intelligence community told the president, as well as the Congress and the public, that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and if left unchecked would probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade.
"Well today we know these assessments were wrong. And as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence."
