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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (589430)	7/10/2004 10:04:49 AM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Editorial: Intelligence CYA/Senate GOP aims to help Bush July 10, 2004 ED0710 If anyone thinks the Senate Intelligence Committee report on pre-Iraq war intelligence failures, released Friday, is all about making needed corrections to U.S. intelligence agencies and procedures, they're mistaken. This report is all about covering the Bush administration's posterior and getting President Bush reelected this fall. More than a year ago, when the Senate Intelligence Committee began talking about doing this investigation, the Republican committee majority wanted no part of it. The Democrats wanted a single broad investigation, similar to the work of the congressional 9/11 commission, that looked both at how the flawed intelligence was produced and how it was used by the Bush administration. To get any investigation at all, the Democrats had to settle for dividing the work into two parts. The first part, the basis for the report released Friday, investigated the intelligence failures themselves. The second part, yet to begin and conveniently due long after the fall election, investigates how the Bush administration used the intelligence to build its case for war. When the draft Senate report was sent to the CIA, officials there delayed the report for months and moved to have almost half of it redacted. Many of the redactions had no intelligence rationale; they were simply meant to eliminate as much embarrassment for the agency as possible. In the end, about 20 percent was left out. So what you have is an investigation that was politicized from the outset, being further politicized by CIA efforts to avoid shame. Service to the American people -- the ostensible reason all these people work in Washington -- played at most a minor role. The Senate report's criticisms of the CIA and other agencies will come as no surprise to most people. The intelligence failures have been well-catalogued by the 9/11 commission and various authors who have delved into the issue. Predictably, Republicans rushed to proclaim that the report exonerated the Bush administration's prewar activities. "I would say it's a total vindication of any allegations that might ever have been made about what the administration did with the information," asserted Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga. He said that, with a straight face, about an investigation that was specifically designed to avoid questions of "what the administration did with the information." And what the administration did with the information wasn't pretty. It spun an entire web of exaggerations, misleading statements and outright falsehoods that induced the American people to believe both that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed huge amounts of weapons of mass destruction, and that it was closely linked to Al-Qaida and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Neither was true, and many people said so forcefully before the war in Iraq. The notion that the Bush administration acted in good faith then, only to learn later that it had been misled by the CIA, doesn't pass the smell test. The CIA made many mistakes, but the Bush administration grossly amplified those mistakes. The administration also frequently ignored CIA cautions that did not fit the administration's long-standing determination to wage war in Iraq come hell or high water. The American people were duped into war by an administration that knew exactly what it was doing. Now it's trying to prevent exposure of its prewar conniving. Its efforts are cynical attempts to thwart the proper working of American democracy. Those efforts are not worthy of the American people, and they must not be allowed to succeed. startribune.com