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On July 9, 2004 the Senate Intelligence Committee released the first part of their report on pre-Iraq war intelligence. The report said most of the judgments used in the National Intelligence Estimate used to justify the Iraq war were either overstated or not supported by the raw intelligence reporting. Prewar intelligence regarding Iraq's threat to the United States was neither reliable nor accurate.
The second part of the Intelligence Committee’s report deals with how this faulty intelligence was used by the Bush administration.
The Republican controlled Senate Intelligence Committee decided to hold the second part of the report until after the November elections. In July the second half of their report was 80% complete.
Right after the official press conference by Senators Roberts and Rockefeller, the chair and co-chair, Democratic Senators Feinstein and Wyden held their own press conference to tell the rest of the story. I don't have a link, because I taped it on C-Span. I transcribed it and posted the highlights then:
Press conference by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) 7/9/04
SEN. WYDEN: (Senator Wyden shows page 50 from the report which is almost completely blacked out and he talks about the “wrestling” that goes on to get as much of their repot public as possible.) Finally, given the public interest and public attention in this matter, we were able to wrestle a substantial portion out. That is what you and the American people are going to see.
The fact of the matter is this is not a fair process and it is not a process that is in the interest of the American people. It is absolutely critical that documents that need to be protected from a National Security standpoint are protected. But again and again we see that a lot of times these documents are not protected for National Security reasons, they are protected for political security reasons to protect individuals from embarrassment.
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I think it is absolutely imperative that the second part of our report come out before the elections. The American people have a right to know how that faulty intelligence was used.
The reason why is because bad intelligence and bad policy are not mutually exclusive. You can have both. I happen to think that’s what you had here. You had faulty intelligence that was then independently compounded by an administration looking for every conceivable rationale for going to war.
So, a lot of people in Washington are betting that part two of this report won’t come out before the election. I just hope that the Congress insist that it does, that all of you and others are aware that the heavy lifting for the Committee is still ahead and we have got to get that second part that deals with how intelligence was used out.
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QUESTION PERIOD
(The senators were asked why they voted for the two part report in February. Sen. Feinstein said they didn’t think it would take this long and that the second half would come out so late.)
SEN. WYDEN: It was really a question of basic math. We didn’t have the votes (single laugh from Sen. Feinstein) in order to have them both come out together. I think it would have been in the public interest to have it come out together. It was just that simple.
I’ll also say though, that between now and November there is ample time to get this out. There is ample time to make sure that the two are linked.
Again, Senator Feinstein and I have spent a lot of time, both on the committee and in our work in the Senate, trying to be bi-partisan. You’ve heard us talk about two pieces of legislation - the question of a (CIA) Director and the legislation Senator Lott and I are pursuing. Unfortunately you cannot drain, this time of the year, politics out of anything and nobody is naive and suggests otherwise.
I do think that it is so important to the country - this question of how intelligence was used - that we’ve got to find a way to get this out. I think if people understand - first that its doable and how important it is - we’ll get it out before November.
QUESTION, EPSTEIN OF THE CHRONICLE: Senator (Feinstein), what’s your opinion of this? Should it be before the election?
SEN. FEINSTEIN: Oh yes, I agree with Senator Wyden.
QUESTION: What’s your impression of the Committee’s report, their work, their status? How complete are they in their findings of how it was used? 50%, 60%? I mean, do they have a lot of work to go? Not much work to go?
SEN. FEINSTEIN: I think the great bulk of the work has been done. I think probably 80% or more there. The rest is just taking these findings and relating them to how they were used by the administration. That’s pretty easy to do because you have the statements made publicly and those statements had to be based on intelligence. The only, I think, question mark in all of this is are there things the administration saw that we didn’t see? I mean, we know the president receives a daily brief that we don’t see. Otherwise, if there are any other items that they have received that we don’t have, that will have to be brought out in this study.
SEN. WYDEN: There’s one other point on this question on the next round ahead for the committee and how the intelligence was used. You simply cannot have accountability unless you get the second part of the report out. In other words, everybody had been talking, well, so and so has been absolved. It’s really the fault of this sector and not the fault of that sector.
The whole point of the second stage of the report is to get the accountability that the American people are asking for. Again and again they’ve said, we’ve heard for years - I mean literally - all of you can go look at your Lexis Nexus and you can see intelligence failures going back certainly two decades. There are remarkable parallels between reports that highlight intelligence failures.
The question is whether this time there’s going to be anything different and whether there’s going to be accountability and whether, in the future, people like yourselves and members of the intelligence committee don’t have to spend weeks and weeks trying to keep most of our reports from looking like that.* Because I can tell you, if it wasn’t for the public attention and public visibility, that we have been able to put on this issue, a good chunk of the report, in my opinion, would have ended up with huge sections blacked out. You got a page from the report right there.
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