Washington -- Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts says his committee's just-released report on pre-war intelligence about Iraq found that "a global intelligence failure" led to the United States, U.S. allies and the United Nations believing that Saddam Hussein had active programs to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

At a July 9 press conference with ranking Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the Kansas Republican said the committee report, while not specifically addressing it, made it clear that a kind of intelligence community "groupthink" affected not just the U.S. agencies, but also "extended to our allies and to the United Nations and several other nations as well, all of whom did believe that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs. This was a global intelligence failure," Roberts said.

Nevertheless, Roberts said, the Intelligence Committee "found no evidence that the intelligence community's mischaracterization or exaggeration of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of politics or pressure" -- i.e., the information was not considered to be politically motivated.

"In the end, what the president and the Congress used to send the country to war was information that was provided by the intelligence community, and that information was flawed," Roberts said.

Roberts made seven points about the committee report:

-- First, most of the key judgments in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's WMD programs "were either overstated or were not supported by the raw intelligence reporting."

-- Second, the committee considered that the intelligence community "did not accurately or adequately explain the uncertainties" behind the judgments in the October 2002 NIE.

-- Third, the committee said the intelligence community "was suffering from what we call a collective ‘groupthink,' which led analysts and collectors and managers to presume that Iraq had active and growing WMD programs," Roberts said.

-- Fourth, "the committee concluded that in a few significant instances, the analysis in the NIE suffered from what we call a layering effect," Roberts said. This happens when the qualifications and uncertainties that go into a judgment are stripped from the chain of information, leaving just the judgment.

-- Fifth, the committee found inadequate efforts by intelligence community managers to encourage analysts to: challenge their assumptions; consider alternative arguments; characterize intelligence reporting accurately; and counsel those who had lost their objectivity.

-- Sixth, the committee found "significant shortcomings" on most aspects of the human intelligence collection efforts against the Iraqi WMD target, especially that the CIA had no human intelligence sources inside Iraq who were collecting against the WMD target after 1998.

-- Seventh, the committee concluded the CIA "sequestered significant reportable intelligence and prevented information from being shared with all source analysts at other intelligence agencies," Roberts said. However, he continued, "with respect to Saddam Hussein's regime and his link to terrorists, the committee did find that the CIA judgments were reasonable, based on the available intelligence. The agency was also more careful to inform policymakers about uncertainties with their analysis."

Rockefeller said the Intelligence Committee report is "absolutely first-rate. Our investigation was objective, our findings are detailed, and the conclusions are devastating."

Rockefeller said, "We found the intelligence judgments regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were not supported by the underlying intelligence. ... The judgments overstated what analysts knew and then failed to explain the uncertainty or uncertainties behind those judgments," he said.

"The report points out the intelligence community began with a presumption ... that Iraq had the weapons, never questioned the assumption that Iraq had the weapons, and viewed virtually every bit of ambiguous information as supporting the fact that the weapons were there," said Rockefeller.

The conclusions of the 500-plus-page report may be found at this link on the Senate Intelligence Committee's Web site (Note: the PDF file is 30 pages long):

http://intelligence.senate.gov/conclusions.pdf