Battle looms over whether Iraq threat was oversold
globeandmail.com
Battle looms over whether Iraq threat was oversold
By PAUL KORING
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
BREAKING NEWS
Oct. 25, 2003
Washington — A bitter partisan battle is brewing over where to lay the blame for grossly misjudging the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq: with the White House or with the spies.
At stake is whether the U.S. public, Congress and allies abroad were misled into backing U.S. President George W. Bush's decision to wage war on Iraq, as Democratic presidential contenders contend.
The opening salvos were fired this week when an early draft of a Senate Intelligence Committee report was leaked to The Washington Post. That draft, apparently prepared by staff under the control of the Republican chairman, fingers the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and other security authorities, faulting them for overstating both the threat of weapons of mass destruction and Baghdad's links with terrorism.
Those preparing the report were taken aback at how key intelligence documents — especially the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate — relied on disputed information or circumstantial and single-source evidence, Republican and Democratic sources told the Post.
Senior Democrat senators, who believe Mr. Bush bears the burden of responsibility rather than the intelligence agencies, fired back yesterday.
"All I can tell you is that there is no report," said Senator John Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, who vowed to force the committee to examine the Bush administration's use, interpretation and presentation of intelligence reports.
In the wake of the leaked draft, which lays the blame squarely on intelligence agencies and in effect exonerates the President, Mr. Rockefeller, the committee's vice-chairman, denounced any rush to judgment. "I'm not going to characterize it as a whitewash," he said. "I'm going to characterize it as a very incomplete matter."
Kansas Republican Pat Roberts, who chairs the intelligence committee, has said he wants the report completed quickly and clearly expects it to blame the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
"The executive was ill served by the intelligence community," he said yesterday, characterizing their work as sloppy and inconclusive.
Getting the report out quickly, and long before the presidential finger-pointing begins in earnest, appeals to Republicans. So does absolving the White House of blame.
"It's my belief that what he [Mr. Roberts] wants to do is to lay all of this out on the intelligence community and never get to any other branches of government," Mr. Rockefeller said yesterday.
Democrats want to delay the report at least until the spring, after the special team looking for Iraqi nuclear, germ and poison-gas-warfare programs makes its findings known. So far no such weapons have been found.
That would relaunch the issue of whether Mr. Bush deliberately overstated the case against Iraq in the middle of his re-election campaign.
A procedural battle is also looming inside the committee. Although its Republican chairman and majority give the President's party considerable power to direct staff and focus the investigation, Senate rules accord the minority Democrats a number of options.
"We're going to get this one way or the other," Mr. Rockefeller said yesterday, referring to Democrat determination to probe whether the White House pressured the intelligence community to shape its assessment.
"If the majority declines to put the executive branch at risk," he added, "then they are going to have a very difficult minority to deal with." |
