Senate report critical of CIA's Iraq work

WASHINGTON, July 9 (UPI) -- The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report Friday strongly criticizing the CIA's intelligence reports on Iraq's weapons capabilities.

"What the president and the Congress used to send the country to war (in Iraq) was based on information from the intelligence community -- and that information was wrong," committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said.

Both Roberts and committee Vice Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., said the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were swayed by their earlier assumptions and crippled by a lack of human intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

"Our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before," as a result of the inaccuracy of pre-war intelligence, Rockefeller said. "Our credibility is diminished, our standing in the world has never been lower, we have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world and that will continue to grow," Rockefeller said.

The report finds no fault with the CIA's intelligence reports about Iraq's connections to international terrorists -- which the agency said were minimal.

The report also finds that the agency's intelligence reporting was not influenced by political pressure -- a finding Rockefeller disputed in his statement at the report's release.