Another Duel In Credibility Gulch: "the president mischaracterizes the report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Yes, the report did state that it 'did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.'
But the committee specifically - and controversially - put off until after the 2004 elections a 'Phase II' report tasked with assessing the public and policy uses of intelligence about Iraq by the administration. The first report simply did not clear the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence and misleading the American people. Period. ('Phase Two' has been delayed and delayed; that's what the ruckus was about when the Senate went into secret session a few weeks ago.)
Third, the Democrats are attempting a creepy 'rewrite' of history that would absolve them of responsibility for their votes for the war and their passivity in checking and balancing the administration. But it absolutely does not follow that the administration leveled with Congress or the public, played straight with the intelligence or that investigations are not still needed.
When The Washington Post ran a piece on the president’s skewed uses of the Senate report, the White House issued a pugnacious response that had the audacity to reach for support from the Robb-Silberman report on pre-war intelligence - a report that began with these damning words:
"On the brink of war, and in front of the whole world, the United States government asserted that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, had biological weapons and mobile biological weapon production facilities, and had stockpiled and was producing chemical weapons. All of this was based on the assessments of the U.S. Intelligence Community. And not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over."
So to rebut claims that its case for war was both wrong and politicized, the administration cites a report concluding that the work of the American spy service before the war flat out failed. Okay. The report also states clearly in the introduction that it was "not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community." That's the million dollar question - not whether Scooter and Cheney strong-armed the spymasters.
The Robb-Silberman Commission did find, as the White House rightly asserts, that "analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
But here's the next sentence: "That said, it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom." "
- posted by geoff @ #