The New York Sun has a good piece about the Silverman-Robb commission’s report on US intelligence failures, focusing on two disturbing conclusions: Libya May Be Hiding Germs, Chemicals, Report Warns. (Hat tip: Ethel.)

WASHINGTON - Since entering a deal to abandon its nuclear program at the end of 2003, the Libyan government has been less than forthcoming about the scope of its biological and chemical weapons programs.

That is one conclusion in a massive report released yesterday by a bipartisan commission originally tasked to examine the failure of the American intelligence community to accurately predict the extent of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program. The 10-person Silberman-Robb commission, chaired by federal appeals court judge Laurence Silberman and a former Democratic senator from Virginia, Charles Robb, concluded in blunt language that, “the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

The harsh judgment of America’s intelligence analysts echoes the critiques of both the Iraq Survey Group, commissioned by the CIA to find the weapons that President Bush said were in Iraq, and a hard-hitting Senate Select Committee on Intelligence review issued last summer.

Unlike those reports, though, the commission provides a more comprehensive assessment of America’s intelligence on other targets. While the unclassified version of the report left blank a section on America’s information regarding Iran and North Korea’s nuclear program, the classified version is said to find America’s grip on both countries’ weapons programs severely lacking. “Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors,” the report found.