President Bush and his top aides repeatedly exaggerated what they knew about the threat from Iraqi nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as the administration pressed its case for war against Iraq, the Senate intelligence committee said today in a long-awaited report.
While most of the administration's pre-war claims about Iraq reflected now-discredited U.S. intelligence reports, the White House crossed a line by conveying certainty about Saddam Hussein's ability to threaten the United States with weapons of mass destruction, according to the report approved by the committee's Democratic leaders and a handful of Republicans.
"In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even non-existent," committee chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) said at a news conference. "As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed."