The war they believe in
Power Line
The only war the Democrats really have their heart in is the war to undermine the Bush administration. Any incidental damage done to the national interest in furtherance of that war appears in their eyes to be for the greater good.
The Democrats' war continues in the latest installment of Murray Waas's iteration of the Democrats' "Bush lied" theme in National Journal:
"Key intelligence briefing kept from Hill panel."
Summarizing the article, Katherine Birrow wrote us on behalf of National Journal yesterday:
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Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.
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Waas also cites a related "highly classified CIA assessment."
For such restricted, highly classified documents, Waas seems awfully certain of their contents. Where is his concern over national security? Or that of his sources?
Isn't some kind of investigation in order?
Waas doesn't say whether the document was leaked to him or whether he is relying on a description of the document provided to him by a reliable source such as Senator Carl Levin or another Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committtee. Waas's article asserts that the administration has denied committtee members access to the PDB and the CIA assessment.
Did the CIA leak them?
The Senate Intelligence Committee is of course seeking to gather this information and similar material for its Phase II report on prewar intelligence. Our friend Steve Hayes of the Weekly Standard comments in a message to us:
If the PDB in issue reads as Waas's article suggests,
then it's an embarrassment. There is no way that the
intelligence community could provide a serious answer
about potential Iraqi involvement in ten days. What's
more, in Senate testimony some two years later George
Tenet said he was still open to Iraqi involvement.
And to dismiss reports of "contacts" seems awfully
premature. We now know -- thanks to Woodward's book --
that we had exactly four HUMINT sources in Iraq before
the war. And we also know -- thanks to the Senate
Intelligence Committee report -- that the intelligence
community had shown virtually no interest in investigating
Iraqi support for terrorism throughout the 1990s. That we
learned as much as we did, for example with respect to
Iraqi meetings with bin Laden, seems to have come almost
by accident.
Interested readers may want to follow up with Steve's book 'The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America' (linked below).
Everything you need to know about Murray Waas can be deduced from his truly obtuse summary of the Wilson/Plame affair:
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Ironically, the Plame affair's origins had its roots in Cheney and Libby's interest in reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to build a nuclear weapon. After reading a Pentagon report on the matter in early February 2002, Cheney asked the CIA officer who provided him with a national security briefing each morning if he could find out about it.
Without Cheney's knowledge, his query led to the CIA-sanctioned trip to Niger by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, to investigate the allegations. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were most likely not true.
Despite that conclusion, President Bush, in his State of the Union address in 2003, included the Niger allegation in making the case to go to war with Iraq. In July 2003, after the war had begun, Wilson publicly charged that the Bush administration had "twisted" the intelligence information to make the case to go to war.
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Waas doesn't earn much credit for his journalistic bona fides with such a partial account. Waas's adoption of Joe Wilson's version of "the 16 words" story is belied by the Senate Intelligence Committee's own report of last year. Maybe it's the unclassified nature of the report that throws Waas off the scent.
Waas's long article ends with a quote that was new to me -- Vice President Cheney's handwritten comment on a Pentagon memorandum summarizing evidence of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection: "This is very good indeed...Encouraging...Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA." You can hear the voice of experience speaking.
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