WP: Avoiding a Critical Inquiry, by Jay Rockefeller

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The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was created in 1976 in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate expressly as a check on potential abuse of intelligence by the executive branch. When no weapons of mass destruction were found after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, the committee correctly began an inquiry into the accuracy and quality of prewar intelligence. But the committee's Republican chairman has refused to look at the whole picture, excluding from the inquiry the subject of how intelligence was used, or potentially misused, and whether policymakers in any way shaped the intelligence they received.

In what is beginning to look like a coordinated effort to shield the administration from scrutiny, Republicans claim that reviewing the ways intelligence was used is not part of the committee's responsibilities. In this they plainly misread the committee's history and organizing resolution, which explicitly calls for oversight of "the collection, analysis, production, dissemination, or use of information which relates to a foreign country . . . and which relates to the defense, foreign policy, national security or related policies of the United States."

The chairman recently went so far as to say that "there is no doubt how the intelligence was used" prior to the war, and so there is "nothing to review" . In fact, there is disconcerting evidence that in this administration, the policymaking is driving the intelligence rather than the other way around. This has added to a growing doubt among the American people about why we went to war, and it is our job to conduct for them a thorough review of the underlying facts.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54789-2003Nov17?language=printer

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