Posted on: Sunday, July 11, 2004

EDITORIAL
CIA intelligence failure needs public debate

No one can take satisfaction over the scathing, unanimous report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee branding the CIA as a sloppy, dysfunctional intelligence structure whose pivotal assessments leading to war in Iraq were unfounded and unreasonable.

Among the findings endorsed by all nine Republicans and eight Democrats on the committee was that a culture of "groupthink" in intelligence agencies left unchallenged an institutional belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The committee's Republican chairman, Pat Roberts of Kansas, said flatly that the president and Congress sent the nation to war because of flawed information from the intelligence community. He added that he wasn't sure Congress would have authorized the war if it had understood the flimsy nature of the intelligence pretext.

The report found no evidence that the White House influenced CIA judgments. Still, mounting revelations that President Bush and some of his Defense Department officials had contemplated war with Iraq long before 9/11 will make it hard for voters, if they decide the war was mistaken, to blame it solely on bad intelligence.

Many critics, this newspaper included, felt the case for war was weak even with the intelligence assessments as presented. Voters will have to decide whether the loss of life and the immense expense of this war are justified, and if not, whose fault that might be.