Senate Iraq Report Said to Skirt White House Use of Intelligence
By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: July 8, 2004
WASHINGTON, 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." ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/08/politics/08inte.html---
Senate Delays Issuing Iraq Report on White House Role
The New York Times is reporting a new Senate report on Iraq will be highly critical of the CIA's prewar intelligence but will sidestep the question of how the Bush administration used the information to make the case for war. Democrats and Republicans reached a deal that it would likely wait until after the November elections to address the Bush's administrations role. The Times reports this may help President Bush and his allies to blame the CIA for mistakes made. The Senate report will be released Friday morning, less than 24 hours after CIA holds a farewell tribute to George Tenet who is resigning. Tenet's top deputy John McLaughlin will officially take over the agency on an interim basis beginning Sunday. ---
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/08/1443239