Bush to Sign Intelligence Investigation
Reported By: The Associated Press
Last Modified: 2/1/2004 5:56:33 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush will sign an executive order to establish a full-blown investigation of U.S. intelligence failures in Iraq, a senior White House official said Sunday.
The investigation will look at what the United States believed it knew before the war against Saddam Hussein's regime and what has been determined since the invasion. Former chief weapons inspector David Kay has concluded that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, a chief rationale for the U.S.-led war.
Bush has been under mounting political pressure to agree to an inquiry, and decided over the weekend to go forward. Democrats and Republicans alike have been pushing the White House to establish a commission.
By setting up the investigation himself, Bush will have greater control over its membership and mandate. The senior White House official said it would be patterned after the Warren Commission, so
named for its chairman Earl Warren, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court, which led a 10-month investigation that concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John F. Kennedy.
In appointing the members, Bush will draw heavily from intelligence experts who are familiar with the problems in the field, the White House official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The investigation will be independent and be provided with the resources it needs to do its job, the official said.
Its mandate will be broader than simply what went wrong in Iraq, the official said. It also will look into issues such as gathering intelligence on stateless regimes, such as al-Qaida, and weapons proliferation.
At this point, the White House has not decided on a deadline for the investigation -- a sensitive issue since its findings could become an issue in the presidential campaign which will be decided
with the election in November.
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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