A Reminder of How Debate Over Prewar Intelligence Continues to Shadow Bush - New York Times
"To date, the two major official inquiries - by the Senate Intelligence Committee, in 2004, and the Robb-Silberman commission, in March 2005 - have addressed only the prewar intelligence itself. Neither found evidence that any political pressure by the Bush administration had contributed to the failures by the Central Intelligence Agency and others in assessing the threat posed by Iraq.
On the question of whether there were close, collaborative ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the reviews found that Mr. Cheney and others had encouraged analysts to rethink their skepticism, but they found no evidence that the repeated questioning from the administration had altered the conclusions reached by the agencies.
But neither panel compared public statements by Mr. Bush and his aides with the intelligence available at the time, or reviewed internal White House documents, including a draft of a speech to the United Nations Security Council later delivered by Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, for further evidence of how intelligence had been used.
The Robb-Silberman commission was established by the White House, not Congress, and in releasing its report last March, Judge Laurence Silberman, one of the two co-chairmen, said, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policy makers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."
The scope of the initial Congressional review, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, was limited in March 2004, under an agreement between Republicans and Democrats, after Republicans blocked Democratic efforts to address issues involving the administration's use of intelligence.
Republicans regarded that issue as too sensitive for a presidential-election year, but their stance prompted sharp protests from Democrats, including Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the panel. This month, Democrats closed the Senate for two hours and threatened to shut it down if Republicans did not agree to move ahead with that part of the inquiry. "
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