Public campaign
The long-delayed Senate study supported previous reports and findings that the administration's main cases for war
– that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was spreading them to terrorists
– were inaccurate and deeply flawed.
"The president and his advisors undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the (September 11) attacks to use the war against al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein," Rockefeller said in written commentary on the report.
"Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises."
A statement to Congress by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the Iraqi government hid weapons of mass destruction in facilities underground was not backed up by intelligence information, the report said. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said Rumsfeld's comments should be investigated further, but he stopped short of urging a criminal probe.
The committee voted 10-5 to approve the report, with two Republican lawmakers supporting it. Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri and three other Republican panel members denounced the study in an attached dissent.
"The committee finds itself once again consumed with political gamesmanship," the Republicans said. The effort to produce the report "has indeed resulted in a partisan exercise." They said, however, that the report demonstrated that Bush administration statements were backed by intelligence and "it was the intelligence that was faulty."
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said, "We had the intelligence that we had, fully vetted, but it was wrong. We certainly regret that and we've taken measures to fix it."
