Myths of Intelligence Failure

Strategypage debunks the claims of intelligence failures that led to the Iraq War:

These charges, however, were themselves a case of overstatement. Reports by David Kay and Charles Duelfer showed that Iraq was maintaining the ability to produce chemical weapons and long-range missiles. General Tommy Franks described the Iraqi programs as being the equivalent of a disassembled pistol. This is hardly a severe intelligence failure- it is more a case of intelligence agencies taking the worst-case scenario (a prudent measure in the wake of a terrorist attack that had killed nearly 3,000 people and the underestimation of Iraq’s progress towards nuclear weapons after Desert Storm in 1991), and discovering that their assessments had been a little too pessimistic.

And on the Saddam/Al Qaeda link:

One document recovered by a Toronto Star reporter in April, 2003, discussed bringing an envoy from bin Laden to Baghdad to “discuss the future of our relationship” with Osama bin Laden. There were reports of contacts as well. Two of the most intriguing are Mohammed Atta’s reported meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April, 2001 and the actions of Ahmed Hikmat Shakir in Malaysia in January, 2000