Friday, July 09, 2004

In the "no duh" department:

From today's Washington Post

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the committee's vice chairman, called the assessments of Iraq before the 2003 war "one of the most devastating intelligence failures in the history of the nation."

He said in the same news conference, "We in Congress would not have authorized that war with 75 votes if we knew what we know now." While the government "didn't connect the dots" in analyzing clues before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he said, "in Iraq we were even more culpable, because the dots themselves never existed."

As a result of the intelligence failures, he said, "our credibility is diminished, our standing in the world has never been lower" and "we have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world." Rockefeller added, "As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before."

From cnn.com

Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who heads the committee, told reporters that assessments that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and could make a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade were wrong.

"As the report will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," he said.