Reports Detail Errors Before War

The two long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee reports released yesterday shed new light on why U.S. intelligence agencies provided inaccurate prewar information about Saddam Hussein and his weapons programs, including details of how Iraqi exiles who fabricated or exaggerated their stories were accepted as truthful because they passed Pentagon lie detector tests.

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The CIA concludes, "There comes a point where the absence of evidence does indeed become the evidence of absence." That statement is a play on a remark Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld made frequently in the months before the war, after United Nations inspectors in late 2002 and early 2003 could find no weapons, that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

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One surprising conclusion from the CIA retrospective is that the agency now believes that aggressive U.N. inspections in Iraq in 1991 after the Persian Gulf War led Hussein to what it described as a "fateful decision." He covertly dismantled and destroyed the undeclared nuclear, chemical and biological facilities, materials and actual weapons he had put together in the preceding decade -- along with "the records that could have verified that unilateral destruction."

As a result, there was no proof in 2002 and 2003 when the Iraqis claimed they had no weapons of mass destruction, and Hussein could not demonstrate he was in basic, if not complete, compliance with U.N. resolutions. Noncompliance with the Security Council's October resolution was the main U.S. public rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/08/AR2006090801719.html

'errors' my foot.