President Bush says he agrees with a commission that has called for broad and deep changes to the U.S. intelligence community. The commission released its final report on Thursday one year after Mr. Bush appointed it to study the United States' pre-war intelligence failures in Iraq. The report says the assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was one of the most damaging intelligence failures in recent US history. It says US spy agencies gathered too little intelligence in Iraq, and did not adequately explain to lawmakers how much the assessments were driven by assumptions rather than evidence.
Among other proposals, the panel recommends that the new US intelligence director put a strong management team in place to oversee what it calls a fragmented community. It also warns the United States knows too little about the nuclear programs of what it calls the world's most dangerous countries.