Prometheus 6

Hopefully the almost-half the country that still thinks otherwise will get the message now (though I fully expect the first half hour of Washington Journal to be filled with denials).  The primary defense they'll have will be, "Everyone thought Saddam had WMD," irrelevant as that is.

But it's occurred to me that the USofA probably owns, what, three out of four sattelites in operation? I'm trying to lowball my guestimate. GPS is ours, I think Europe's competitor is only a couple months old. It really strikes me that most Western nations' intelligence agencies would be analysing information provided to them through their partnerships with the USofA, and supplementing that with their own work.

Senate Panel Releases Report on Iraq Intelligence
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 — The Central Intelligence Agency last fall repudiated the idea that there were pre-war ties between Saddam Hussein’s government and the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, according to a report issued on Friday by the Senate intelligence committee.

The disclosure undercuts continuing claims by the Bush administration that such ties existed, and that they provided evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The Republican-controlled committee also sharply criticized the administration for its reliance on the Iraqi National Congress during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

The findings, in two new reports, are part of an ongoing inquiry by the Senate committee into pre-war intelligence about Iraq. The conclusions went beyond the committee’s earlier findings, issued in the summer of 2004, by including criticism not just of American intelligence agencies but also the administration.

The reports did not address the politically divisive question of whether Bush administration had exaggerated or misused intelligence in its effort to win support for the invasion of Iraq. But they did serve to undercut the administration’s assertions, made before the war and since, that ties between Mr. Zarqawi and Mr. Hussein’s government provided evidence of a close relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.