Intelligence Investigation Time Line

Senator Reid has a brief history of the Repubican foot dragging on the intelligence investigation here.

Phase 2: How Stacked is this Deck?

I'm not optimistic that Phase 2 of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation will find anything conclusive on the use of intelligence in the run up to war. Half of the six members on the panel are Republicans, and none of those Republicans are exactly "moderate" or without ties to the White House.

Christopher "Kit" Bond, Republican Senator from Missouri, is a good example. He's been on the talk shows lately parroting the company line (you already heard the high points in Mister Bush's Veteran's Day speech. Unjustified accusations, sending the wrong message, blah, blah, blah).

In July 2004, during a GOP stump speechin Saint Louis, Vice President Dick Cheney said:

In my current role as the presiding officer of the United States Senate, I can confirm that Kit Bond and Jim Talent are one of the finest teams serving today in the United States Senate…

…I've known Kit Bond now for, I guess, close to 30 years. Kit, we've done a great deal of work together. He does a superb job, not only for Missouri but for the entire nation. And President Bush and I will be extremely proud this fall to serve on the same ticket with Kit Bond, who's going to win reelection for another term in the United States Senate.

It doesn't exactly sound like Kit and Big Dick are strangers.

Nor was Bond a disinterested observer of the Nigergate scandal. During the 2004 campaign, he was a key figure in the campaign to discredit Joe Wilson. In an appearance on The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, he said:

I think it's very important that the American people understand that this man [Wilson] held up as a great truth-teller is no such thing and is in fact a disingenuous dissembler…

… The whole Wilson story has been exposed as a fraud and a hoax designed only to smear the president.

We now know that the president's story was a fraud and a hoax designed to smear Wilson. But more importantly, we know from his own words and actions that Bond has a dog in the fight to "prove" the no one in the administration tampered with the intelligence on Iraq.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase One report, released in July of 2004, contained several "additional views." One of them, authored by Democratic Senators Jay Rockefeller, Carl Levin, and Dick Durbin said that:

…the Committee’s phase one report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which Intelligence Community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq when policy officials had already forcefully stated their own conclusions in public.

Bond was among the Republican members of the committee who added the other two "additional views." One was a statement that the committee Democrats had refused to include a statement in the report that discredited Joe Wilson. The other was a rebuttal of the Democrats' assertion that the intelligence had been "pressured."

So it's little wonder that when Senator Harry Reid called for the secret session to bring attention to the delay in Phase 2 of the investigation, Kit Bond was among the first to label the action a "political stunt."

Kit Bond has several dogs in the fight to discover who or who didn't manipulate intelligence, including himself.

#

On a related note, you may remember that Bond was one of only nine senators who voted against the interrogation limits bill.

Lindsey Graham Goes to Bat for Big Brother

I once had so much hope for Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Remember last spring when the Senate had Rummy up on the hill to grill him on the Abu Ghraib scandal? I do.

On Friday afternoon, Lindsey Graham looked like he was going to jump up, fly across the table, and stick Rummy's microphone up his ear.

By Monday, Graham was on screen shaking hands with John Warner of Virginia and making nice.

I thought at the time that sure as shooting, the neocons had threatened to break his political kneecaps and he'd rolled over for him.

#

And sure as God made little green apples, Graham is still carrying water for the neocons. He's the one leading the movement to deny Guantanamo detainees the right to a writ of Habeas Corpus, saying that it's not fair for the administration to be sued in the middle of a war.

I have to wonder if Graham understands that the Constitution specifically grants the right to suspend habeas corpus "unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it" to Congress, not the president, and that it doesn't allow for the legislative branch to transfer this power to the executive branch under any circumstances.

Then again, it probably doesn't matter if Graham realizes that or not.

He's just another good little Republican Senator who's sworn allegiance to Big Brother and the Holding Company.

How soon will his Pinnochio nose be as long as Pat Robertson's?

How Big Will Pat Roberts' Nose Get?

If Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas is on the up-and-up, cigarettes are a cure for lung cancer. I haven't seen a transcript yet, but based on Roberts' performance on Late Edition on Sunday, it's plain as the nose on the guy's face that his first priority is to protect the White House and himself from blame for the Iraq intelligence manipulation.

This is the same Pat Roberts who chairs the "bipartisan" Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on which Republicans outnumber Democrats.

#

Confusion:

The Committee's Phase One investigation conclusions blast the intelligence community, and contain the sentence:

The committee found no evidence that the [Intelligence Community's] mischaracterization or exaggeration of the intelligence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was the result of political pressure.

If they didn't investigate political pressure in Phase I, why in the world would they include that statement in their conclusions? It's difficult to believe that inserting that sentence wasn't an attempt to preemptively interdict the process of Phase II.

#

Over at TomPaine.com, John Prados provides several perceptive insights.

In phase one, the Bush administration sought a definition of “politicization” that was so narrow it prevented the commission from reaching finding any fault.

And you can bet the cost of a tank of gas that if the administration wanted a narrow definition, Pat Roberts moved heaven and earth to make sure they got it.

It's important, Prados says, for the Phase II investigators to have subpoena power to explore the entire context of what went on between policy makers and the intelligence services. That means exploring all the nooks and crannies inhabited by Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, and the entire cast of neocon characters who publicly advocated the Iraq invasion back in 1998 and who invaded the executive branch in 2002.

I'm not entirely optimistic the Intelligence Committee will be able to do that.

As Prados asserts, Senator Roberts is…

…already attempting to divert the panel from fulfilling its responsibility. The committee’s own press release described the aim of phase two as an inquiry into “whether any influence was brought to bear on anyone to shape their analysis to support policy objectives." To accomplish this, Roberts is arguing that the panel should merely review administration statements in the run-up to war and see if there was intelligence that supported each claim. This minimalist approach would give the Bush administration a free pass for politicizing the analytical process and then cherry-picking the conclusions that fit its needs.

Put another way, the administration and its allies (like Roberts) are trying to erase the past faster than they can accuse their critics of rewriting it.

Latest Edition

Roberts and Levin on Blitzer.

Roberts is protecting the White House, and presumably himself. The dissenting opinion never got to the policy maker.

Oh, really?

Roberts, the guy who chairs the Select Senate Committee that's going to "investigate" the administration's "use" of the intelligence.

And also says, "We don't torture."

This is the guy in charge of getting to the bottom of the run up to war.

We are so screwed.

Stooping to Their Level

After railing at Mister Bush and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley all weekend for lying about having been exonerated of having cooked the Iraq intelligence, I find this headline over at HuffPo:

President's Approval Rating Falls To Record Low

It's a link that takes you to the Newsweek article from November 12 that carries the magazine's latest poll results.

The Newsweek piece carries the headline "Autumn of Discontent." Nowhere does the article refer to "record low ratings." In fact, the piece reports that Mister Bush's present 36 percent approval rating equals the low point of Mister Clinton's popularity, and that the Bush 41, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon all had approval ratings worse than 36 percent at some point in their presidencies.

We might consider HuffPo's "record low" reference to be "true" if we take it to mean a "record low" for Bush 43. But it's pretty obvious that they're sending a message that Mister Bush is at a record low for all presidents since polls have been taken. If they're not lying outright, they're being purposely misleading at best.

The folks at HuffPo have done quite a bit of this sort of thing lately, and I really wish they'd stop it.

Still Lying

"I think it's a lie to say the president lied to the American people."

John McCain on Face the Nation, November 13, 2005

But he did, Senator. Mister Bush lied on Friday when he said he'd been absolved by two separate investigating committees of tampering with the Iraq intelligence.

No mention of that from Bob Schieffer.


--

Hadley on Blitzer's Late Edition, saying Silberman-Robb commission and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence both exonerated the administration of manipulating intelligence.

Wolf let him get away with it.

Hadley said it again.

Wolf tries to refute him on the Silberman-Robb claim. And he's bringing up the Senate Select Committee issue.

Hadley denies everything.

Wolf tries to get him back on topic.

Hadley slips off the hook.

Incredible!

My Pal Tim

On Meet the Press a few minutes ago, Howard Dean was trying to make an important point--that Mister Bush lied in his speech on Friday when he implied that his administration had been exonerated of tampering with the intelligence on Iraq by both an independent and a Congressional committee.

Tim Russert cut Dean off, and never let him get back to the subject.

What is Russert up to?

It certainly seemed to me like he let Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman get all his talking points out.

MSNBC Aids and Abets Admin Propaganda Machine

Some yahoo on MSNBC just stated words to the effect that the Bush administration has been absolved of intelligence tampering by two investigations.

Unbelievable.

To review the bidding:

Mister Bush's commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, headed by Judge Laurence H. Silberman, was not ordered to look into use of intelligence by the administration, so it didn't.

And the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has yet to look into whether the administration cooked the intelligence. That's what Harry Reid was screaming about last week.

#

And here we have the MSM acting as echo chamberlains, parroting the "absolved" meme, carrying water for the administration's propaganda machine.

Rovewellian!

Veterans Day Dubya Talk

Suburban Guerilla steers us to this WaPo piece by Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus:

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.
Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

That's a very polite way of putting it.

Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions…

The WaPo article is a quick read, and an important one.

Bottom line: Congress didn't really see the "same intelligence" the White House saw. Mister Bush's "independent commission" on WMD wasn't ordered to investigate the administration's use of intelligence, so they didn't. And the Senate investigation was supposed to investigate the intelligence manipulation, but hasn't done so yet.

Bush and Hadley are, as usual, full of it.