Railroad
Routinely Derailed
Below is an excerpt from the Associated Press story posted on the YAHOO! News. I added emphasis in one place by using bold italics.
Panel: Agencies 'Dead Wrong' on Iraq WMDs <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com
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White House - AP<o></o>
By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer <o></o>
WASHINGTON - In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows "disturbingly little" about the weapons programs and threats posed by many of the nation's most dangerous adversaries. <o></o>
The commission called for dramatic change to prevent future failures. It outlined more than 70 recommendations, saying that President Bush must give John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, broader powers for overseeing the nation's 15 spy agencies. <o></o>
It also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office. <o></o>
The unclassified version of the report does not go into significant detail on the intelligence community's abilities in Iran and North Korea because commissioners did not want to tip the U.S. hand to its leading adversaries. Those details are included in the classified version. <o></o>
The commission was formed by Bush a year ago to look at why U.S. spy agencies mistakenly concluded that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, one of the administration's main justifications for invading in March 2003. <o></o>
"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the commission said in a report to the president. "This was a major intelligence failure." <o></o>
The main cause, the commission said, was the intelligence community's "inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence. <o></o>
"On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude," the report said. <o></o>
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Panel: Agencies 'Dead Wrong' on Iraq WMDs <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com
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></o>9 minutes ago<o
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></o>White House - AP<o
></o>By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer <o
></o>WASHINGTON - In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows "disturbingly little" about the weapons programs and threats posed by many of the nation's most dangerous adversaries. <o
></o>The commission called for dramatic change to prevent future failures. It outlined more than 70 recommendations, saying that President Bush must give John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, broader powers for overseeing the nation's 15 spy agencies. <o
></o>It also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office. <o
></o>The unclassified version of the report does not go into significant detail on the intelligence community's abilities in Iran and North Korea because commissioners did not want to tip the U.S. hand to its leading adversaries. Those details are included in the classified version. <o
></o>The commission was formed by Bush a year ago to look at why U.S. spy agencies mistakenly concluded that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, one of the administration's main justifications for invading in March 2003. <o
></o>"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the commission said in a report to the president. "This was a major intelligence failure." <o
></o>The main cause, the commission said, was the intelligence community's "inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence. <o
></o>"On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude," the report said. <o
></o><o
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