Mike Levin: “Tomorrow's report of the Senate Intelligence Committee will be intensely and extensively critical of the CIA for its…”

“Tomorrow's report of the Senate Intelligence Committee will be intensely and extensively critical of the CIA for its intelligence failures and mischaracterizations regarding Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. That report is an accurate and a hard-hitting and well-deserved critique of the CIA. It is, of course, but half of the picture. Earlier today I released an example of the other half. A few days ago the CIA finally answered, in an unclassified form, the question I have been asking them about whether the Intelligence Community believes that a meeting between an Iraqi intelligence official and Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, occurred in Prague in the months before al-Qaida's attack in America on 9/11. The answer of the CIA illustrates the point that tomorrow's Intelligence Committee report is extremely useful regarding the CIA's failure, but it does not address another central issue--the administration's exaggerations of the intelligence that the CIA provided to them. That is left for the second phase of the Intelligence Committee's investigation. This newly released, unclassified statement by the CIA demonstrates that it was the administration, not the CIA, that exaggerated the connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. The new CIA answer states that the CIA finds no credible information that the April 2001 meeting occurred and, in fact, that it is unlikely that it did occur.”