Site Meter

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Walter Pincus reports that the Specially Selected Subcommittee of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has reached agreement on how to investigate how the Bush administration reported and used pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

It is clear that his sources are Democrats, since the article suggests that Roberts has completely conceded everything. That their will be further testimony, that it is not enough to find some support for a claim in the raw intelligence but they must also consider whether relevant information (e.g. the only source of the info just failed a lie detector test) was kept from the public. The part that interested me most was the statement that the gross errors which will be examined will not just be those related to WMD but also to how everything has gone wrong during the occupation.

Yesterday, senators were given classified staff drafts of two other sections of what will be a five-part phase two study. One was to compare the prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs, and its relations with al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, to what was found on both subjects after the war. The second was to compare prewar assessments of what postwar Iraq would look like with the reality that has emerged.


This is very bad for Bush, because, while there was usually some neighborhood of the intelligence community that fell for each WMD story, no intelligence analyst claimed that the occupation would be a cake walk or neglected to mention things that could go wrong as most of them did.

No comments: