Intel official: Iraq was intel, policy failure

[unhappycamper]

Intel official: Iraq was intel, policy failure
By Pamela Hess - The Associated Press
Posted : Tuesday Dec 9, 2008 21:00:20 EST

WASHINGTON — Gently admonishing President George W. Bush, the nation’s newly retired chief intelligence analyst on Tuesday suggested that the Iraq war was as much the failure of policymakers as it was the flawed intelligence on which they relied.

Bush told ABC News last week his biggest regret was “the intelligence failure in Iraq.”

“I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess,” Bush said.

Thomas Fingar, until this week the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, declined to directly address the president’s swipe. But he said: “I learned something a long time ago in this town. There are only two possibilities: policy success and intelligence failure.”

Fingar is in a better position than many in the intelligence agencies to assess those possibilities. Before the Iraq invasion, he was second in command of a small group of State Department analysts that notably cast doubt— albeit behind closed doors — on a key Bush administration rationale for the 2003 war.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/12/ap_iraq_intelligence_120908/%2e