Tuesday, November 01, 2005

From the unanimous Senate Intel Committee's report on Pre-War Intel

The Committee did not find any evidence that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as a result of political pressure, altered or produced intelligence products to conform with Administration policy, or that anyone even attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to do so. When asked whether analysts were pressured in any way to alter their assessments or make their judgments conform with Administration policies on Iraq’s WMD programs, not a single analyst answered "yes." Most analysts simply answered, no" or "never," but some provided more extensive responses. Some of their responses are below:

A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) biological weapons (BW) analyst said, "NO, never. Never. Matter of fact, the assessments we make have always tried to -we always tried to be as accurate and always as truthful as we can, and it might be that our assessments suited what they needed. But we were never pressured to make an assessment a certain way or anything.’’

The National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Science and Technology said, "my answer to all of those is there was no pressure on me throughout that entire period. I did not have any analysts come to me with any information about the fact that they were feeling pressure to change their judgments. And I was certainly not aware of any, whether I heard it or not. So there were really no -as far as I’m concerned, there were no such things happening."

A CIA chemical weapons (CW) analyst said, "there was no pressure at all. They didn’t tell us what to say or anything like that."

Harry Reid today:"The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions." Uh huh.