[political-research] Re: WSJ.com - Battle Looms Over Use Of Prewar Iraq Intelligence

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Battle Looms Over Use
Of Prewar Iraq Intelligence

As Senate Panel Prepares
To Report on Investigation,
Democrats See Election Issue

By JAY SOLOMON
March 24, 2006; Page A4

WASHINGTON -- The long-simmering battle over the Bush administration's use of prewar Iraq intelligence is about to flare again.

Republicans controlling the congressional investigation say they will finish by next week a spate of reports on how the White House used intelligence headed into the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. They will include topics like predictions before the war on how a post-Saddam Iraq might look and whether the Bush administration was duped by Iraqis with a vested interest in war, like Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi.

But they have set no timetable for issuing reports on their probe into what some Democrats consider the most explosive questions: Whether political appointees at the Pentagon deliberately distorted intelligence and subverted analysis by the Central Intelligence Agency to gin up support for the invasion.

"There were a lot of mistakes in the lead-up to the war, and if we don't look at all the issues we won't get a complete picture of what happened," says Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Democratic Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia. "The role of the former Undersecretary of Defense's office is an area of concern."

Some people familiar with the Senate investigation say politics may overshadow substance on the matter. "I think people will be surprised when these things come out because the buildup has been made that there's some smoking gun," says William Duhnke, Republican staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "This has all outstripped the reality."

Last fall, Democrats briefly shut down the Senate amid protests that the majority party was delaying the intelligence investigation. This year, they are gearing up to make it an issue in the November elections -- and an argument for changing control of Congress to bring about tougher oversight of the Bush administration's intelligence activities. Democrats' ability to subpoena current and former Bush administration officials, as well as gain access to many still-classified documents, they say, could significantly change future intelligence investigations.

IN THE POLLS

 

• From Harris: Bush ratings on Iraq (Updated March)
 
• Other Polls: Bush's standing in multiple polls
 

"There's so much that still needs to come out," says Maurice Hinchey, a Democratic Congressman from New York who has sought for months to force the White House to release documents related to prewar intelligence. "A change in either house could completely change the nature of the game."

Even before U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein in March 2003, some critics said the White House tried to justify the invasion by distorting the magnitude of Iraq's weapons programs and alleged ties to the al Qaeda terrorist network. That June, the Senate Intelligence Committee initiated its first review of the U.S. government's pre-Iraq war intelligence activities, with a focus on the "quantity and quality" of the intelligence gathered by U.S. agencies. The report, completed a year later, absolved the White House of seeking to influence or distort information gathering on Iraq.

The Senate Intelligence panel, however, decided to widen the original investigation to focus more on how the White House used the intelligence, rather than just how it was collected. Democrats originally sought to complete the Phase II probe before the 2004 presidential election, but the pace has been slowed by disagreements between the parties over the scope and mechanics of the five-part study.

Democrats have criticized the Intelligence Committee's chairman, Kansas Republican Pat Roberts, who also is being accused of blocking calls for a congressional probe into the White House's domestic-wiretapping program, which President Bush confirmed late last year.

In announcing last week his timetable for completing the next series of reports, Mr. Roberts took some shots at his opponents. "Much has been said over the last few months about the committee's progress on Phase II," he said. "Notwithstanding the minority's public cries of 'delay,' Phase II has been ongoing, ..." he added.

The three near-completed studies, he said, focus on the Bush administration's use of intelligence provided by an Iraqi exile group, Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress; postwar findings on prewar assessments of Iraq's alleged WMD program and terrorism links; and prewar assessments about postwar Iraq's political and security environment.

Sen. Roberts's office says a fourth section also is imminent, comparing whether statements by President Bush and other senior U.S. officials about Iraq's WMD programs and alleged links to al Qaeda heading into the war were supported by U.S. intelligence.

But Mr. Roberts didn't offer a timetable for completing the fifth and final section of the investigation, which looks into activities before the war by the office of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

Former Bush administration officials say Mr. Feith's office circulated reports that overstated the links between Mr. Hussein and al Qaeda. Mr. Feith's office also faces questions about whether it subverted proper intelligence-gathering channels by engaging in activities normally conducted by the CIA.

A number of officials who worked on assembling intelligence on Iraq before the war say Mr. Feith's operations at the Pentagon were important in shaping the debate on Iraq. They said the office had strong links to the White House and the Office of the Vice President and that it could set an extremely aggressive tone on the question of whether Mr. Hussein had a relationship with al Qaeda, even if the facts didn't necessarily support the claims.

"What the operation under Feith was doing was trying to collate anything that showed a link" between Baghdad and al Qaeda, says Paul Pillar, who served as the CIA's National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia during the first Bush term. Mr. Pillar recently accused the White House of skewing intelligence reporting on Iraq to justify the invasion. "They'd disregard everything that came from other sources. It was just a matter of collecting and sifting," he says.

Mr. Feith said yesterday that charges his office had engaged in improper intelligence activities were groundless. "My office did not engage in intelligence collection. ... The intelligence we used came from the intelligence community itself," he said. He added that his office rigorously vetted information that both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a White House-sponsored panel investigating intelligence failures called for.

Democrats have been pushing for the Senate's Intelligence Committee to do an independent study of Mr. Feith's operations; the Pentagon's Inspector General currently is conducting an internal review of them. Sen. Roberts and Republicans have decided to defer to the Pentagon's internal report before further investigation. The Pentagon review began in November, but a spokesman for the Inspector General said he could offer no time frame for its completion.

Write to Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com

--- In political-research@yahoogroups.com, bill.giltner@... wrote:
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> You've got to give the WSJ credit. They do some great pen drawings. They could have thrown in a mustasche on Doug Feith, but I guess I'm quibbling. Seems like if we could get 9/11 in the Congressional spotlight and as an election issue, maybe the WMD fight might not be so important.
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