Panel: Intelligence on Iraqi WMDs 'wrong'

WASHINGTON -- America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most prewar assessments about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and know disturbingly little about current nuclear threats, a presidential commission said Thursday.\n"Our collection agencies are often unable to gather intelligence on the very things we care the most about," the panel concluded in an unsparing report.\nIt recommended dozens of organizational changes, and said President Bush can implement most of them without congressional action. It also urged the president to back up John Negroponte, his choice to be the new director of national intelligence, in any bureaucratic turf battles ahead.\n"The central conclusion is one which I share. America's intelligence community needs fundamental change," Bush said at the White House after receiving the critique from a commission he was at first reluctant to appoint.\nHe said he had directed Fran Townsend, his White House-based homeland security adviser, to "review the commission's finding and to assure that concrete actions are taken."\nBush read a prepared statement, flanked by retired Judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican, and former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb of Virginia, co-chairmen of the panel.\nThe president then strode from the room, leaving the two men behind to field questions on the report that criticized past performance -- but didn't stop there.\nWhite House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush discussed the report with members of the commission in the Cabinet Room and that he met in the Situation Room with Cabinet secretaries who might be affected by the recommendations.\nThe president stressed to the Cabinet members the importance of taking the recommendations\n"Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors," the report said.\nThe commission also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office.\nRobb and Silberman agreed they had found no evidence that senior administration officials had sought to change the prewar intelligence in Iraq, possibly for political gain.\nRobb said investigators examined every allegation "to see if there was any occasion where a member of the administration or anyone else had asked an analyst or anyone else associated with the intelligence community to change a position they were taking or whether they felt there was any undue influence. And we found absolutely no instance."\nIn the months preceding the Iraq war, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly invoked Saddam Hussein's presumed possession of weapons of mass destruction as a reason to invade.\nThe report was the latest tabulation of intelligence shortfalls documented in a series of investigations since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 against the United States. Numerous investigations have concluded that spy agencies had serious intelligence failures before the attacks. Thursday's report concluded that the problem still has not been fixed, three years after al-Qaida struck America.