NEW YORK, 13 July 2004 — This week President George W. Bush is escalating his support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which — according to some political analysts — is an effort to divert attention away from a disturbing report released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Bush administration’s prewar assessment of Iraqi weapons.
Over the weekend, both liberal and conservative editorialists jumped on the issue. “The report is a condemnation of how this administration has squandered the public trust it may sorely need for a real threat to national security,” editorialized The New York Times.
“The report was heavily censored by the administration and is too narrowly focused on the bungling of just the Central Intelligence Agency. But what comes through is thoroughly damning,” said the NYT. “Put simply, the Bush administration’s intelligence analysts cooked the books to give Congress and the public the impression that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear arms, that he was plotting to give such weapons to terrorists, and that he was an imminent threat,” NYT said.
Noting these assertions were the basis of Bush’s justification for war, the NYT notes: “Sadly, the investigation stopped without assessing how President Bush had used the incompetent intelligence reports to justify war.” The centralist Christian Science Monitor, said the Senate reports “critical of the intelligence community’s prewar assessments of Saddam Hussein’s power ... appears set to provide charges of incompetence for weeks to come.”
“The bottom line,” says the CSM is: “The US appears poised to continue an unprecedented national argument about the inner workings of its national-security apparatus, with the charged context of an election year inevitably affecting that debate.”
The CSM says the report pointed out that prior to the invasion of Iraq, CIA information described an Iraqi Army long on dysfunction and short on strength. “The most dangerous weapon Iraq possessed at the time may have been the unpredictable Mr. Hussein himself.”
It says the panel’s censure comes in the midst of a tumultuous time at the CIA. Just Sunday, George Tenet, who served as director for the past seven years, left. And his deputy director for operations, Jim Pavitt, also resigned.”
On the conservative side, the Washington Times was quick to share the blame: “The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence unanimously blamed the CIA for errant assertions and mistaken assumptions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. Much of that scathing criticism is well-deserved. However, the blame must be shared by the members of the committee, who failed badly in their constitutional duty of oversight.”
The WT says the senators who criticized the intelligence community for its failures played a major part in the subsequent tragedy, because “the committee members — including Sen. John Edwards — were charged with the duty of oversight and received the necessary powers to do so... Presumably, senators had access to some — if not all — of that material.”
In blaming the commission, the WT continues: “The committee’s exhaustive report speaks eloquently to the failures of those who produced it. Had the senators and their staff who dedicated so many resources to examining the failures of intelligence after the war pursued proof of Iraq’s WMD in the same painstaking manner during the buildup to the war, the debate may have been more useful.
The Senate’s pointed report demonstrates both the failure of the intelligence gatherers and the failure of their congressional overseers,” says the WT.
