American Intelligence ‘Dead Wrong’ On WMD: Panel

The presidential panel report on WMD intelligence has determined that the spy agencies got its information “dead wrong” but did not politicize or distort its findings to suit any particular policy, the AP reports this morning:

In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America’s spy agencies were “dead wrong” in most of their judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows “disturbingly little” about the weapons programs and threats 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 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.

On the oft-leveled charge of politicization, the panel unanimously rejected the notion that anyone bent the intelligence agencies’ arms to get the analyses either administration wanted:

But the commission also said that it found no indication that spy agencies distorted the evidence they had concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, a charge raised against the administration during last year’s presidential campaign.
“This is not `politicization’,” the panel said of its own report. “It is a necessary part of the intelligence process.”

Hopefully we will see the unclassified report released later today in PDF format so that a more detailed look at their post-mortem and recommendations can be had by all. Please scroll to my previous post for an analysis of the recommendations made by the panel regarding even more bureaucratic shuffling in response to their concerns.