Missing WMD Report (Corn / Nation)

When is a priority not a priority? When it's after the election.

Last July the Senate Intelligence Committee released a much-anticipated report on the prewar intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The study concluded that the intelligence community--led by the CIA--had "overstated" and "mischaracterized" the intelligence on Iraq's (nonexistent) WMDs. The massive report repeatedly detailed instances when the intelligence services botched the job by ignoring contrary evidence, embracing questionable sources and rushing to judgments that just happened to fit the preconceived notions of the Bush Administration. "What the President and the Congress used to send the country to war was information that was...flawed," declared Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the committee. Jay Rockefeller, the committee's senior Democrat, noted that the report outlined "one of the most devastating...intelligence failures in the history of the nation."

But the committee's report did not cover a crucial area: how the Bush Administration used--or abused--the prewar intelligence to build support for the Iraq invasion. Roberts claimed his committee was hot on that trail: "It is one of my top priorities," he said. The problem, he explained, was that there was not enough time before the November election to complete the assignment. Rockefeller took issue with that and complained that the "central issue of how intelligence was...exaggerated by Bush Administration officials" was being relegated into a "Phase II" investigation that would not begin until after the election. A Democratic committee staffer said that such an inquiry could easily be completed within months.

Still, Roberts succeeded in his transparent effort to kick that inconvenient can down the road. (Imagine the headache for the Bush campaign if news stories appeared before the election reporting that the committee had found Bush had stretched an already stretched truth.) Now--with Bush re-elected--Roberts no longer considers Phase II a priority. In mid-March, Roberts declared further investigation pointless. He noted that if his committee asked Bush officials whether they had overstated or mischaracterized prewar intelligence, they'd simply claim their statements had been based on "bum intelligence." Roberts remarked, "To go though that exercise, it seems to me, in a postelection environment--we didn't see how we could do that and achieve any possible progress. I think everybody pretty well gets it." Gets what, precisely? The evidence is strong that Bush and his aides overstated the overstated intelligence. One example: Bush claimed that Iraq possessed stockpiles of biological weapons, yet the CIA reported only that Saddam had an active biological weapons R&D program. (It turns out he had neither stockpiles nor an active program.) The question is, How and why did Bush and his lieutenants come to exaggerate exaggerations? And just because the answer is obvious doesn't mean an investigation is unwarranted. <snip>

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050411&s=corn

... into two parts: (i) what went wrong with intelligence and (ii) how the Bushistas used/misused intelligence. And the committee then struck a political deal: part (i) would be done before the election and part (ii) after the election. But now the Republicans (surprise! surprise!) are saying part (ii) is pointless: no further investigation, so nothing to report.

investigating claims of torture. There's no point to uncovering the truth if it might show someone in the WH did wrong ...