On Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a damning 511-page analysis that found the pretext for the U.S. invasion on Iraq was based on bad intelligence and fabricated information.

Iraq did not have unmanned aircraft to disperse weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was not collaborating with Al Qaeda. Iraq did not reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. Iraqi did not have a fleet of seven mobile labs used to manufacture deadly biological weapons.

The Senate also found that Saddam Hussein’s army had been weakened significantly after the first Gulf War and posed little threat to US interests in the Middle East.

The report found many of the most alarming claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were handed to the US by defectors.

Even after the report, President Bush continued to defend the invasion, which has now cost the lives of 1,000 coalition troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis. He said “We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass destruction.”

The leading Democrat on the intelligence committee Jay Rockefeller said Congress would not have authorized the war if it had known then what it knows now. He called what happened one of the “most devastating.. . intelligence failures in the history of the nation.”

The New York Times described the report as the harshest congressional indictment of U.S. intelligence agencies since the Church Committee report of the mid-1970s on CIA abuses of power.

The Senate has yet to issue its report on how the Bush administration handled the intelligence on Iraq. That report is not expected until after the election.

David Corn of the Nation reports that while the CIA exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq, the Bush administration in turn exaggerated what the CIA was saying. Corn writes “Bush and his lot overstated the overstatements of the intelligence community.”

Corn points out that the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate said Iraq had an extensive biological weapons program, Bush turned around and said Saddam Hussein was sitting on a “massive stockpile” of biological weapons. When the CIA said Iraq was developing unmanned drones, Bush warned that Iraq already had a growing fleet of the vehicles and that the fleet could attack the United States.

In addition Senator Rockefeller and two fellow Democrats wrote in the report that the Bush administration ignored the CIA’s findings that Iraq was not collaborating with Al Qaeda.

While the report is being dubbed as a bipartisan product, a major divide has emerged over how much the Bush administration pressured intelligence analysts to read the intelligence to fit the administration’s policy.

In an addendum to the report, the CIA ombudsman told the committee that he felt the 'hammering' by the Bush Administration on Iraq intelligence was harder that he had previously witnessed in his thirty-two-year career with the agency.