US Senate report on Iraq intelligence will not focus on White House: press

[papau]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1520&ncid=1520&e=3&u=/afp/20040708/pl_afp/us_iraq_intelligence_040708134158

US Senate report on Iraq intelligence will not focus on White House: press

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Senate's report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq will focus only on misjudgments by the CIA and other US agencies and sidestep the issue of how the White House used the intelligence.

The 410-page report is expected to be released on Friday, but it will not include a second phase of the year-long investigation that will focus on how the White House used the assessments from its intelligence agencies on Iraq, Congressional officials told the daily.

The second phase of the investigation involving the White House will likely not be completed until after the November 2 US presidential election, the officials said.

Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee reached a deal in February to divide the inquiry in two parts as a compromise between the views of the top Republican on the committee, Senator Pat Robertson, and the top Democrat Senator John D. Rockefeller.

Robertson argued that investigating how the White House used the pre-war intelligence on Iraq was beyond the scope of the committee, while Rockefeller insisted that the inquiry delve into whether the US government's statements on Iraq were substantiated by intelligence information. <snip>


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/08/politics/08inte.html

Senate Iraq Report Said to Skirt White House Use of Intelligence
By DOUGLAS JEHL

ASHINGTON, July 7 - A bipartisan Senate report to be issued Friday that is highly critical of prewar intelligence on Iraq will sidestep the question of how the Bush administration used that information to make the case for war, Congressional officials said Wednesday.

But Democrats are maneuvering to raise the issue in separate statements. Under a deal reached this year between Republicans and Democrats, the Bush administration's role will not be addressed until the Senate Intelligence Committee completes a further stage of its inquiry, but probably not until after the November election. As a result, said the officials, both Democratic and Republican, the committee's initial, unanimous report will focus solely on misjudgments by intelligence agencies, not the White House, in the assessments about Iraq, illicit weapons and Al Qaeda that the administration used as a rationale for the war.

The effect may be to provide an opening for President Bush and his allies to deflect responsibility for what now appear to be exaggerated prewar assessments about the threat posed by Iraq, by portraying them as the fault of the Central Intelligence Agency and its departing chief, George J. Tenet, rather than Mr. Bush and his top aides.

Still, Democrats will try to focus attention on the issue by releasing as many as a half-dozen "additional views" to supplement the bipartisan report. "How the administration used the intelligence was very troubling," Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview this week. "They took a flawed set of intelligence reports and converted it into a rationale for going to war."

The unanimous report by the panel will say there is no evidence that intelligence officials were subjected to pressure to reach particular conclusions about Iraq. That issue had been an early focus of Democrats, but none of the more than 200 intelligence officials interviewed by the panel made such a claim, and the Democrats have recently focused criticism on the question of whether the intelligence was misused. <snip>

[librechik]

1. rate this yahoo article please

outrageous!

[maddezmom]

2. done

Its current average rating is 3.84 with 37 vote(s). Need some more votes!!

[underpants]

3. AFTER the election?

Ohh brother