WASHINGTON, March 31 (UPI) -- A special presidential panel has made more than 70 intelligence community reform recommendations in a document released by the White House Thursday.
Among the recommendations listed in an unclassified version of the report were: establishment of a new intelligence center that would focus on WMD proliferation; better checking of intelligence sources; more congressional and other oversight; and more attention being paid to dissenting information analysis.
The panel was officially named the Commission of the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction and was jointly chaired by former federal judge Lawrence Silberman and former Sen. Charles Robb, a Virginia Democrat.
President Bush appointed the panel after suspected weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq after the war. Possession or pursuit of WMD was a main impetus for the U.S.-led invasion.
Pre-war intelligence analysis on Iraq was a "major intelligence failure," the report said. Not only was information that Iraq possessed nuclear, biological and chemical weapons capabilities -- or were developing them -- wrong, but there were "serious shortcoming in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers."
