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Senators Urge CIA to Declassify Critical Report on Prewar Assessments of Iraq
The CIA should declassify and release the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the agency’s prewar performance on Iraq, the panel’s leaders said yesterday (see GSN, June 4). Senators Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) and John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the ranking committee members, told the New York Times they support the fullest possible disclosure of the agency’s performance on Iraq. “I feel very strongly that the great majority of this report should be made public,” Roberts said. “Our report is a good one. It’s right, and the American people certainly deserve to see it,” he added. The agency has been reviewing the report for about a month, and Senate staff had expected the document to be returned by last week, the Times said. Roberts said the committee yesterday approved a set of recommendations to be included in the report during a closed meeting. While members had tentatively planned an approval vote on the report this week, the panel is not scheduled to meet again until next week. A senior intelligence official said yesterday there were “some things in the report that we know to be factually incorrect.” The official added that analysis was continuing. “It’s being done entirely by career civil servants whose job it is to determine what remains classified and what can be declassified,” the official said. He added that senior-level officials at the agency would ultimately have to approve the decisions. Government officials said the report details a number of mistakes the agency made by relying on uncorroborated sources of information about Iraq’s alleged WMD programs, such as those provided by defectors aligned with Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Sources close to outgoing CIA Director George Tenet have speculated that the report may have hastened his resignation, which he announced last week. The report is one of three due this summer that are expected to be critical of the CIA’s performance on Iraq intelligence, the Sept. 11 attacks, or both (Douglas Jehl, New York Times, June 9).
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