The impetus for the Commission lay with a public controversy occasioned by statements, including those of Chief of the
Following intense study of the American Intelligence Community, the Commission delivered its report to the President on March 31, 2005, the so-called Robb-Silberman Report.[5]
Regarding Iraq, the Commission concluded that the United States Intelligence Community was wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and that this constituted a major intelligence failure.
The Intelligence Community's performance in assessing Iraq's pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure. The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community's assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers.— Unclassified version of the commission's report, p. 46
The Intelligence Community's performance in assessing Iraq's pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure. The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community's assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers.
The Commission's report also described systemic analytical, collection, and dissemination flaws that led the intelligence community to erroneous assessments about Iraq's alleged WMD programs. Chief among these flaws were "an analytical process that was driven by assumptions and inferences rather than data", failures by certain agencies to gather all relevant information and analyze fully information on purported centrifuge tubes, insufficient vetting of key sources, particularly the source "Curveball," and somewhat overheated presentation of data to policymakers.
The 601-page document detailed many U.S. intelligence failures and identified intelligence breakdowns in dozens of cases. Some of the conclusions reached by the report were:
The report also looked forward, recommending a large number of organizational and structural reforms. Of the 74 recommendations to the President, he fully accepted 69 in a public statement released on June 29, 2005.
The Commission's mission is, in part, "to ensure the most effective counter-proliferation capabilities of the United States and response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the ongoing threat of terrorist activity." With regard to Iraq, the commission was meant to "specifically examine the Intelligence Community's intelligence prior to the initiation of Operation Iraqi Freedom and compare it with the findings of the Iraq Survey Group and other relevant agencies or organizations concerning the capabilities, intentions, and activities of Iraq relating to the design, development, manufacture, acquisition, possession, proliferation, transfer, testing, potential or threatened use, or use of Weapons of Mass Destruction and related means of delivery."
Commission members are:
The first seven members of the panel were appointed on February 6, 2004, the date of the executive order which created it. The final two members, Vest and Rowen, were appointed on February 13.
Days before the American commission was announced, the government of the
The commission was independent and separate from the
Footnote 274 [of the Iraq Intelligence Commission] elaborates, explaining that 'when [DIA] pressed for access to Curveball, [BND] said that Curveball disliked Americans and that he would refuse to speak to them.'