SPRINGFIELD -- The United States' pre-war intelligence on Iraq was dead wrong, according to the president's Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Despite the report, Missouri's senior U.S. senator says the decision to go to war was still the right one.

  Bond is a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence.  In an interview here on Thursday, Bond said the bad intelligence came from an archaic system based on assumptions rather than thorough analysis and human intelligence.  He also placed much of the blame on the Clinton administration.

  The commission’s report says the harm done to American credibility will take years to undo.

  “The intelligence community had not challenged its own assumptions, did not provide the caveats they should have about some of their sources,” said Bond.      

  The senator notes that the commission cleared the Bush administration of manipulating the intelligence for political purposes.  He took a shot at the Democrats.

  “The Clinton administration cut the intel budget by 20 percent.  The Director of Intelligence got rid of spies -- human intelligence that we badly needed in the war against terror,” said Bond.

  An expert on terrorism, Southwest Missouri State University political science professor Mehrdad Haghayeghi, says many Democrats and even some Republicans never would have voted for the war if the president hadn’t hyped the threat.

  “Traditionally, intelligence is the foundation for policymaking.  In this case, unfortunately, the Bush administration had devised the policy of intervention in Iraq and looked for intelligence that fit that policy,” said Haghayeghi.

  Bond fears the new director of National Intelligence doesn’t have enough power and says his daily briefings to the president will be critical as other foreign threats emerge. 

  The report also says the United States knows disturbingly little about current nuclear threats.  And some experts believe this report will make it harder to push for sanctions against countries that may be gaining that capability, like Iran.

  Bond also isn’t sure whether the United States has good enough intelligence about Iran and North Korea.

  “It's getting better but it’s not nearly as good as it should be,” he said.

  Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Missouri, also was in the area on Thursday.  He says there's enough blame to spread around all agencies in government. 
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 Here's The Associated Press' report on the commission's report:

  WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The 3 1/2 years since the terrorists' attacks on Sept. 11, 2002, have seen the creation of a new Homeland Security Department, a major reorganization of spy agencies and countless condemnations of the way things were done. Still, the $10 million presidential commission says, the nation's spies are still missing the mark.

   "Our collection agencies are often unable to gather intelligence on the very things we care the most about," the President Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction concluded in a bruising report on Thursday.

   "Dead wrong" on Saddam Hussein's weapons, the report said.  "Too little innovation to succeed in the 21st century."

   Though Bush initially opposed the panel's creation, he promised immediate action at a news conference with retired Judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican, and former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb of Virginia, the commission's co-chairmen.

   "To win the war on terror, we will correct what needs to be fixed," Bush said.

   The commission offered 74 recommendations aimed at changing the structure and culture of the nation's 15 spy agencies.  It called for more clarity in the powers of the newly created national intelligence director, an overhaul of national security efforts in the Justice Department and dozens of changes in intelligence collection and analysis.

   "There is no more important intelligence mission than understanding the worst weapons that our enemies possess, and how they intend to use them against us," the commission said.  "These are their deepest secrets, and unlocking them must be our highest priority."

   The report, approved unanimously by the bipartisan nine-member panel, followed the failure of U.S. inspectors in Iraq to turn up any weapons of mass destruction.  The existence of weapons stockpiles - detailed in dozens of intelligence reports before the March 2003 invasion - was the administration's leading argument for toppling Saddam.

   The report painted a picture of a clumsy intelligence apparatus struggling to penetrate Iraqi operations and wrongly concluding that Saddam had weapons capable of causing catastrophic damage.  Commissioners found intelligence collectors didn't provide enough information or were deceived by discredited sources and analysts relied on old assumptions about Saddam's intentions and overstated their conclusions.

   "On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude," said the report, which exceeded 600 pages.

   The commission found the spy community ill-prepared to penetrate adversarial nations and terror groups.  It said agencies must do a better job of preventing attacks with biological agents and learning about the spread of nuclear weapons.

   "Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors," the report said.  "In some cases, it knows less now than it did five or 10 years ago."

REPORT IN BRIEF

CONCLUSION: America's spy agencies were wrong in most prewar assessments about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and know "disturbingly little" about current nuclear threats, a presidential commission said yesterday.

RECOMMENDATIONS: It recommended dozens of organizational changes and said President Bush could implement most of them without congressional action. It also urged the president to support John Negroponte, his choice to be the new director of national intelligence, in any bureaucratic turf battles ahead.