“Declassified CIA document reveals US analytic errors before Iraq war” @ PressTV

Posted on September 6, 2012

September 6, 2012: “The document, declassified on Wednesday, describes US intelligence failures on Iraq as the result of analytic mishaps and predispositions that kept US analysts from seeing the issue “through an Iraqi prism.”

Prior to the 2003 military occupation of Iraq, the US intelligence community had claimed that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, backed by Washington throughout the 8-year war he waged against the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1980’s, was hiding stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

“Given Iraq’s extensive history of deception and only small changes in outward behavior, analysts did not spend adequate time examining the premise that the Iraqis had undergone a change in their behavior, and that what Iraq was saying by the end of 1995 was, for the most part, accurate,” the report reads in part.

The key findings of the declassified document are reportedly released nearly in full while the body of the report is filled with blackened codewords, sources and intelligence reports that are still kept classified, seven years after the Iraq Survey Group reported to the CIA director on the near total failure of the prewar assessments……………………”

Read more at PressTV.