Faulting agencies

It's unlikely that weapons of mass destruction will ever be found, a senator said.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
WASHINGTON -- U.S. intelligence agencies are "in denial" and have yet to hold anyone accountable for the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and for the misjudgment that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Monday.
In a speech that was sharply critical of the CIA, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said members of Congress were especially troubled because no one in the U.S. intelligence community "has been disciplined, let alone fired" for the intelligence failures of the past three years.
Roberts took a veiled swipe at CIA Director George J. Tenet, who reportedly assured President Bush before the war that it was a "slam-dunk" case that Saddam possessed hidden stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.
"Rarely is any intelligence case a 'slam-dunk,'" Roberts told students at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., according to a copy of the speech released by Roberts' office. "We have found serious failures to share information before 9/11 and in the prewar work on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Where is the accountability?"
Roberts said one explanation might be "an institutional inability to recognize or admit there are problems. Simply put, the [intelligence] community is in denial over the full extent of the shortcomings of its work on Iraq and 9/11."
Bad intelligence
He said members of Congress, as well as the White House, were ill served by a National Intelligence Estimate that warned that Iraq had produced hundreds of tons of nerve gas and germ agents, and was trying to build a nuclear bomb.
The estimate, presented as the best judgment of the CIA and 14 other U.S. intelligence agencies, was issued in October 2002 as Congress prepared to vote to authorize the administration to use force in Iraq.
"The problem is, the information was wrong," Roberts said.
He called it "unlikely" that weapons-hunting teams in Iraq still might find stockpiles of illicit arms. The CIA has said it is too early to conclude that no weapons will be found. Iraq Survey Group experts still have millions of pages of Arabic documents to read and hundreds of potential hiding places to visit.
Funds
Roberts also challenged claims that the intelligence community was short of money. Although intelligence budgets are classified, Congress sharply increased funding for U.S. intelligence operations after the 9/11 attacks, to an estimated $40 billion this year.
"The question is now less a matter of 'do they have enough' as opposed to 'are they spending it wisely?'" Roberts said. "We continue to spend money on increasing collection when we still don't have the ability to fully analyze what we already collect."
A CIA spokesman said later Monday that he had no response to Roberts' charges.
Roberts was viewed as a strong supporter of the CIA when he became chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee early last year. But he has grown increasingly critical of the agency's operations, especially for their misjudgments in Iraq, and of Tenet's seven-year tenure as director of Central Intelligence.
Partly as a result, the Senate committee recently completed what Roberts called "probably the most comprehensive review of intelligence" since the oversight committee was created in 1976 amid revelations that U.S. intelligence agencies had conducted illegal bugging, assassination plots and other abuses.