THE SENATOR ROBB, JUDGE SILBERMANN WHITEWASH

April 01, 2005
By Larry C. Johnson

"Dead wrong" is the phrase the media is trumpeting from the report issued by former Senator Chuck Robb and Judge Laurence Silbermann under the title , Final Report on Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Hopefully most Americans will take time to read the report and understand what a woeful, inept job that Robb and Silbermann have done. I agree with the Commission report that analysts made mistakes. But for all of the massive detail provided in the 600 plus page report, Robb and Silbermann fail to answer the most basic question: Was there any intelligence analysis from the CIA that indicated Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction had reached the point that if we did not act Saddam would? The answer is no. Yet, Robb and Silbermann want Americans to accept the nonsense that politics played no role in the intelligence analysis. They ask America to accept the sorry picture of a President and legislators who apparently were willing idiots being spoon fed wrong information by incompetent analysts. If we accept this fairy tale we will have learned nothing from the fiasco in Iraq.

But do not take my word for it. Consider what is presented in the Chapter on the Iraq failure. According to the report the analysts said,

The pre-war estimate of Iraq’s nuclear program, as reflected in the October 2002 NIE Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, was that, in the view of most agencies, Baghdad was “reconstituting its nuclear weapons program