The former head of the National Security Agency, Gen. Michael Hayden, says U.S. intelligence agencies got it wrong when they concluded Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and they should take the blame for that, rather than the White House.
“It was our intelligence estimates” that were incorrect, Hayden says in an interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel. “We were wrong. It was a clean swing and a miss. It was our fault.”
Hayden, a retired Air Force general, ran the the National Security Agency in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003. He later served as deputy director of National Intelligence and then as director of the CIA.
His 10-year tenure in these top intelligence positions was no ordinary decade. In addition to the Iraq War, there was the Sept. 11 attacks, the expansion of NSA data collection and the investigations into claims of torture by CIA interrogators.
Hayden writes about this period in a new memoir, Playing to the Edge.
Read or listen to the NPR interview.
The Director of the CIA received the country’s highest medal that can be given to a civilian for giving George Bushvexactky the intelligence he needed to justify that war
It was a slam dunk
@John: So, I wonder why so many prominent Democrats supported the validity of that information BEFORE Bush was President? Because Bush invented a time machine, went back in time to 1995 and tricked them?