As the current UK Inquisition continues today (with misleading conclusions), I found this from BBC News, regarding the 2006 assessment:
In September 2006 the US Senate Intelligence Committee published one of the definitive public accounts of the intelligence used to justify the Iraq war.
Its 400-page report, three years in the making, laid bare the justifications for the invasion – and found little or no evidence to back a raft of claims made by the US intelligence community concerning Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction [WMD].
Also note pg 145, on the Additional Minority Views of Senators Bond, Hatch, Lott, and Chambliss:
for the past two years, rather than pursue our oversight role and ensure that some of the key findings and recommendations of these reports and others were enacted, this Committee ‘s usefulness as an oversight body and as a key element in our national security apparatus has been consumed by a rear-view mirror investigation for political ends.
~~~ (U) Simply stated, this second series of reports is designed to point fingers in Washington and at the Administration. The conclusions in the reports were crafted with more partisan bias than we have witnessed in a long time in Congress. The “Phase II” investigation has turned the Senate Intelligence Committee, a committee initially designed to be the most bipartisan committee in the Senate, into a political playground stripped of its bipartisan power, and this fact has not gone unnoticed in the Intelligence Community.
No mention of the (highly partisan) 2008 Final Phase II Reports in the article?
Scott wrote up the definitive key points of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Phase II investigation report on pre-war Iraq Intel
Other op-ed writers weeks after the initial media coverage of the Final Phase ii Report, also asserted that within the Report, Bush claims were “generally substantiated by the intell at the time”.
The BBC piece also mentions
Eighteen months before the Senate report, the Silberman-Robb commission – set up by President Bush in early 2004 – had reported in no uncertain terms that US intelligence had been “dead wrong” in judging that Iraq had been developing WMD before the invasion.
But fail to mention about how the commission report also exonerated the charge that intelligence was manipulated to persuade public opinion.
A former fetus, the “wordsmith from nantucket” was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1968. Adopted at birth, wordsmith grew up a military brat. He achieved his B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (graduating in the top 97% of his class), where he also competed rings for the UCLA mens gymnastics team. The events of 9/11 woke him from his political slumber and malaise. Currently a personal trainer and gymnastics coach.
The wordsmith has never been to Nantucket.
On September 24, 2002 the British government released a report:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/middle_east/02/uk_dossier_on_iraq/html/full_dossier.stm
“As a result of the intelligence we judge that Iraq has: sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it.”
In his January 28, 2003 State of the Union address, George Bush said, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” And Bush’s statement was, of course, somehow twisted by democrats and the media to actually refer to a fake Nigerian “yellow cake” letter when in reality he cited British intelligence during his speech.
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2009/11/eastern_syria_becomi.php
Meanwhile our moronic press ignores the CONTINUING cooperation between the two. The utter ignorance of our press never ceases to amaze me.
I was half-baking a post on that last night, Mark; but didn’t publish.