WASHINGTON - January 29 - 20/20 Vision, a national, nonpartisan public education organization, today called on Congress to create an independent commission to investigate the Iraq war intelligence failure. “We need a nonpartisan, independent commission to assess what the intelligence community knew about Iraqi weapons before the invasion and to look into what role the Bush administration played in the intelligence breakdown,” said Tom Z. Collina, 20/20 Vision Executive Director.

Dr. David Kay, the former chief U.S. inspector in Iraq, called for an outside commission yesterday in testimony before the Senate. Kay testified that “…in this case you will finally determine that it is going to take an outside inquiry, both to do it and to give yourself and the American people the confidence that you have done it.” On the issue of alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Kay stated over the weekend: “I don’t think they existed.”

Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Senator Jon Corzine (D-NJ) have introduced bills in Congress to create an independent commission to investigate intelligence on Iraq. The Bush administration and Republicans in Congress are opposed to a nonpartisan investigation that looks inside the White House. Asks Collina, “Do they have something to hide?”

Last January, President Bush claimed that Iraq’s alleged arsenal of deadly weapons posed an imminent threat to America. Now, after nine months of fruitless searching, it appears that the Bush administration was wrong.

In his recent the State of the Union address, the President switched from talking about actual weapons to “programs” to develop them, as if they were the same thing. When reminded that the war was based on Iraq’s possession of weapons, not its intentions, Bush told ABC News in December, “So what's the difference?"

According to Collina, there is a big difference. “If Iraq didn’t possess weapons stockpiles, then Iraq was not an imminent threat that required a go-it-alone, pre-emptive invasion,” he said. “There was time to continue weapons inspections, time to build an international coalition, and time to develop an effective plan to win the peace. Indeed, there was time to avoid this war—and save the hundreds of lives lost and billions of dollars spent. But all of that was trampled in the rush to invade.”

Worse yet, according to former administration officials, the administration hyped the threat to build the case for war. In a Time Magazine interview in January, former Treasury Secretary and National Security Council member Paul O'Neill declared, "In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction." Retired General Anthony Zinni, former head of US Central Command (CENCOM) in the Middle East, put it bluntly: “I think the American people were conned into this." He stated that, “In my time at CENTCOM, I watched the intelligence, and never—not once—did it say ‘He [Saddam] has WMD.’”

“America went to war—one of the most profound decisions a nation can make—based on an alleged threat that in fact did not exist,” Collina stated. “This should be a major concern to all Americans and deserves a thorough investigation, much like the one currently looking into the September 11 terrorist attacks. Yet President Bush wants to sweep this under the rug by claiming that it makes no difference. Far from it. It is the difference between war and peace. “

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