Iraq WMD failures shadow US intelligence 20 years later

By NOMAAN MERCHANT
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two decades ago, U.S. spy agencies wrongly believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That intelligence drove the rationale for one of America’s most costly and deadly wars. Those intelligence failures deeply shaped American spy agencies and a generation of officers and lawmakers trained to be more skeptical. They also helped drive a major reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community. But they did lasting damage to the credibility of U.S. intelligence. A new AP-NORC poll finds that only 18% of U.S. adults have a great deal of confidence in the government’s intelligence gathering agencies.