Anna Eshoo: “The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence... has been carefully evaluating the prewar intelligence…”

“The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence... has been carefully evaluating the prewar intelligence assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's purported ties to al Qaeda. This bipartisan investigation has already established that the intelligence community significantly overstated the strength of its evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, failed to convey where hard intelligence left off and assumptions began, and dropped caveats from crucial judgments. In my view, it is also clear that policymakers went even further beyond the intelligence assessments in categorically stating that Iraq possessed chemical weapons and had restarted a nuclear program. Regarding ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, the intelligence community, in my judgment, curiously made the opposite error. Instead of coming to an overall conclusion, as it did in the case of Iraq's WMD programs, the community simply arrayed everything it had and let policymakers come to their own conclusions, which they were only too happy to do.”