»Senate intelligence committee: Bush and Cheney are to blame«

On the issue of Iraq's relationship with al Qaeda, however, the committee's findings imply that the White House, not the CIA, is to blame for making dubious claims that there were working ties between Osama bin Laden's organization and Hussein's Iraq . "The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s, but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship," the committee found, echoing the Sept. 11 commission staff's finding of no "collaborative relationship" between the two.
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Even before the report came out, Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) sent out a press release saying the administration asserted Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration that the CIA doubted. Yesterday, the Kerry campaign issued a statement saying: "Nothing in this report absolves the White House of its responsibility for mishandling of the country's intelligence. The fact is that when it comes to national security, the buck stops at the White House, not anywhere else."

A senior intelligence official speaking on condition of anonymity agreed with that logic yesterday, saying the CIA's assertions, whatever their accuracy, did not in themselves justify going to war; the agency made no recommendation on this. "Policymakers should not be immune from the decision on what to do," the official said.
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"Before the war, the U.S. intelligence community told the president, as well as the Congress and the public, that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and if left unchecked, would probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade," Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said in summarizing the report. "Well, today we know these assessments were wrong, and as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence."

Vice Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W. Va.)...continued to assert yesterday there was administration "pressure" on the CIA, although he endorsed the bipartisan committee report stating otherwise. The report, while stating that no intelligence analysts said they felt pressured to change their conclusions, found "tremendous pressure" to avoid missing a potential threat. That made the CIA "purposefully aggressive," as the agency described it, in drawing potential links between Iraq and al Qaeda.
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Even yesterday, after the committee report, Bush said Hussein's Iraq provided a safe haven for an "al Qaeda affiliate." Bush has previously described Hussein as "an ally of al Qaeda" and asserted that Iraq "provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training."

Cheney last month said: "There clearly was a relationship. It's been testified to; the evidence is overwhelming."