Jamie Kirchick had a very timely editorial in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times on one of the major news items of nearly two weeks ago: the Senate Intelligence Committee’s unveiling of the final two sections of its Phase II report on prewar intelligence. Despite having given himself an ample period to peruse the report four or five times, Kirchick primarily only offers a poor regurgitation of Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post piece from last Monday. Having already commented at length on Hiatt’s misleading op-ed, I’ll let that previous post speak for itself. But Kirchick does have a few characteristic zingers.

The only point in the piece that Kirchick attempts to address in the findings of the Rockefeller report is in the alleged connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda:

Rockefeller, for instance, charges that “top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.” Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were “substantiated by intelligence information.” The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.

It is impossible to understand how Kirchick has come to this conclusion. The findings of the report explicitly state that “Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.” The quoted phrase “substantiated by the intelligence” does indeed appear in the report near the words “Iraq” and “al-Qaeda”, but no significant connection is substantiated by the report’s findings.

Kirchick later adds: “The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.” This is also a blatantly false statement. The Bush administration’s biggest crime in its claims about WMD was not their claims about Saddam’s stockpiles, but its claims regarding Saddam’s intent to restart production and distribute them to terrorist organizations. The committee’s findings on these weapons issues were very clear:

Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.

Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.

Kirchick needs to check his facts.

The report can be found here and here. The official government press release on the report can be found here.