»We would not have authorized the Iraq war«

The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies fell victim to false "group think" when assessing Iraq's weapons capabilities and produced overstated or incorrect conclusions that led the Bush administration to justify the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, according to a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday.
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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 .

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"This was a global intelligence failure."

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the committee, said some lawmakers, himself included, " would not have authorized that war ... if we had known then what we know now ."
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It specifically cleared Vice President Dick Cheney , a leading advocate of the war, of accusations that he tried to bend the evidence to fit his agenda.
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It faulted Tenet for not personally reviewing President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, which contained since-discredited references to an Iraqi attempt to purchase uranium in Africa.
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Instead, investigations after the Iraq invasion have shown that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons program and no biological weapons and only small amounts of chemical weapons have been found.

Analysts ignored or discounted conflicting information because of their assumptions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the report said.
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For example, speculation that the presence of one specialized truck could mean an effort to transfer chemical weapons was puffed up into a conclusion that Iraq was actively making chemical weapons, the report said.

Analysts also concluded that Iraq had a mobile biological weapons program based mainly on the since-discredited claims of one Iraqi defector code-named "Curve Ball," it said. American agents did not have direct access to Curve Ball or his debriefers, but the source's information was expanded into the conclusion that Iraq had an advanced and active biological weapons program , the report said.