Phase 1 of a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee was released today. This should be a must-follow story for anyone interested in the whys and hows of the Iraq War. Phase 1 focuses on the intelligence failures, mostly attributed to the CIA, that led to the Iraq War.

A live conference was broadcast earlier today with Chairman Senator Pat Roberts (R) and the Vice-Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D) speaking.

Here are a few highlights. I highly recommend reading the full transcript and/or watching an online broadcast if possible. As you can see from the excepts below, some differences exist in how the report should be interpreted. There is also appears to be a strong and genuine frustration of the committee's Democrat's regarding the delay in releasing Phase 2.

Chairman Senator Pat Roberts (R)

"Now, the debate over many aspects of the U.S. liberation of Iraq will likely continue for decades. But one fact is now clear: Before the war, the U.S. intelligence community told the president, as well as the Congress and the public, that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and if left unchecked, would probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade...Well, today we know these assessments were wrong. And, as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence." - Roberts

"But with respect to Saddam Hussein's regime and his link to terrorists, the committee did find that the CIA judgments were reasonable, based on the available intelligence. The agency was also more careful to inform policy-makers about uncertainties with their analysis...Finally, the committee found no evidence that the intelligence community's mischaracterization or exaggeration of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of politics or pressure." - Roberts

Vice-Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D)

"Tragically, the intelligence failures set forth in this report will affect our national security for generations to come. Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower. We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before." - Rockefeller

"Our report found that the intelligence community's judgments were right on Iraq's ties to terrorists, which is another way of saying that the administration's conclusions were wrong, and that is of the relationship -- formal relationship, however you want to describe it, between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and no evidence existed of Iraq's complicity or assistance in Al Qaeda's terrorist attacks, including 9/11, which, through the device of Mohammed Atta and others, the debate continues almost up until two months ago, at least on the part of the vice president." - Rockefeller

"As a result, the committee's report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq when the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions publicly." - Rockefeller

"It was clear to all of us in this room who were watching that, and to many others, that they had made up their mind that they were going to go to war. And I believe to this day, and I always have and I've said so publicly many times in regretting my vote, that there was a predetermination, even going back to 1998 in a letter to Bill Clinton, saying, 'The time for diplomacy has ended and now is the time for the use of military force.'" - Rockefeller

Full Transcript
Transcript: Report Press Conference - Friday, July 09, 2004, Foxnews.com/Reuters

I personally would rather face the false charges of Bush being a liar than the reality of our CENTRAL Intelligence Agency being unable to do an adequate job.
The way the agency has been diminished over the past thirty years is already being corrected. Bush should have fired Tennent day one, but that would have caused outrage among the left. I can not imagine the cries of power grab. Some suggested the C.I.A. has some goods on GWB as well, causing the pause.

I haven't read all the text, but your snips suggest Rockefeller is willing to act unilaterally on this one!
He suggests we were not hated already by those flying the planes.
He implies Bush linked 911 to Saddam.(never did that, of course). Then proudly declares the link false.
He is sure the administration pressures the C.I.A., though this was also found false.

What is the point of these hearings and committees when so many refuse to acknowledge that their accusations were wrong?

For a number of years now we have heard that the failures of our intelligence agencies, particularily the CIA, have been the result of the extreme measures taken by the over more extreme left wing of the Democratic Party in the 70s. Senator Frank Church is the name most used in damning the castration policies that he and fellow liberals took to cut off the CIA from its former activities. And yet, today, we see a revitalized CIA that still can't get anything right and seems more interested in promoting the overthrow of governments based on essentially false claims. This was the basic criticism against the agency in the 70s after their repeated history of promoting coups in the name of "democracy" which usually resulted in far worse governments than the ones they helped replace.

A great deal of the hatred against the US throughout Latin America comes from the games the CIA played in places like Guatemala. A strong case can be made that our intial policies against Castro were what drove him into the Soviet camp and created decades of poverty within Cuba. Would Castro have ever become so involved in attempting to promote violent revolution in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia if we hadn't done our best to destroy him?

The Shah of Iran was another creation of the CIA which ultimately resulted in the extremes of the Ayatollah and his descendents today. Bush called the present regime in Iran one of the 3 legs of international terror. We have no one to blame except our own foreign policies failures with this country. And it has consistently been the CIA which has either overstated or completely ignored the true conditions of the country.

Gamal Abdel Nasser was one of the most popular leaders ever in the middle east and yet he was continually painted in the US press as an extreme radical and hazard to the world's peace. The CIA spent a fortune trying to undermine him which only helped to legitimize Nasser's policies and added to the already growing distrust of the US throughout the Arab world.

And now we learn that it was the CIA again that totally lied about the real capabilites of Sadam and his regime. Instead of focusing upon Al Queda and the real roots of fanatacism in the Islamic world we have spent the last year and billions of dollars pursuing a war we cannot win.

Clinton entered the White House with promises to redirect the US towards a more equitable society and left in disgrace after serving over one of the single most corrupt administrations in generations. Bush entered with a call to refocus our energies towards being a kind and prosperous nation. He will leave with the legacy of having turned virtually the entire world against us. We can't afford too many more of these idiots.