Who Are the Ones Suppressing the Facts on Iraq?

By Jack Kelly
Jewish World Review

A Democratic theme we're sure to hear repeated this fall is that President Bush "cherry-picked" intelligence on Iraq. But this isn't true, according to the bipartisan Robb-Silverman Commission, which investigated prewar intelligence:

"The commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."

But should Mr. Bush choose to "cherry-pick" intelligence to justify a future conflict, he has a terrific model to follow in the report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Sept. 8.

The report focused on the extent to which the intelligence community relied upon reporting from Iraqis affiliated with the Iraqi National Congress in making its estimates of Saddam's WMD programs and his links to terrorists. The INC was headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite at the Pentagon, but persona non grata with the CIA and the State department.

The report concluded that defectors affiliated with the INC lied to provoke the United States into attacking Iraq and that the information they provided profoundly influenced the intelligence community's assessments of the threat posed by Saddam's regime.

I read the whole 205 pages, and was stunned by the degree to which the "findings" in the body of the report did not support the "conclusions" at the end of it.

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