Congress Still Torn on Pre-War Intelligence

Five Years After the Invasion of Iraq, Members Still Searching for the Truth

By Z. BYRON WOLF

June 6, ABCNews

The Iraq war is now five years old, but on Capitol Hill, lawmakers are still bickering over whether the flawed intelligence that led to the March 2003 invasion was intentionally mishandled.

The Senate Intelligence Committee wrapped up an exhaustive, four-year inquest into pre-war intelligence when it published on Thursday the final two chapters of an ongoing assessment. Several Republicans on the committee joined with Democrats to ratify the report, which concludes that, in speeches they gave in the run-up to the war, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney said that Saddam Hussein had an active program to seek weapons of mass destruction even though there was available intelligence to refute that claim.

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photo: BAGHDAD, IRAQ - JUNE 5 : U.S Army soldiers search for a weapons cache in the backyard of a house on June 5, 2008 in the al-Rahmaniya Shiite neighborhood north of Baghdad, Iraq. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker gave a briefing at the State Department today to discuss recent developments in Iraq. Collapse (Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images)