It will only be three years too late (and three years after it was promised by the Senate GOP), but the Phase II report will see the light of day.
The three unreleased sections of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s controversial “Phase Two” report on the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence are headed for circulation next year, incoming Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) told The Hill late last week.
“One does not want to spend all one’s time looking back, but the history of all this evolution of the war has to be brought to full accountability,” Rockefeller said in a Friday interview.
Damn straight. I suspect we’ll hear all kinds of complaints from the right about Dems playing the “blame game,” looking backwards instead of forwards, placing too much emphasis on government accountability and follow-through, etc. It’s best to ignore the whining altogether.
We’re not talking about some inconsequential trivia. Even if we put aside promises made by the GOP Intelligence Committee leadership for a moment, use (or misuse) of pre-war intelligence is a crucial issue that needs to be resolved. We cannot expect to learn from our mistakes if we’re unwilling to identify those mistakes before moving forward.
It’s likely that Republicans will say it no longer matters whether intelligence was misused before launching a misguided invasion. What’s done is done; let’s not dwell on who cherry-picked what in order to kill whom. Nonsense. Accountability demands answers. What’s more, those who made some of the most tragic mistakes in history are still on the job. Avoiding the questions only exacerbates the problem.
Now, it’s worth noting that some of Phase II was published in September, and it highlighted the fact that Saddam Hussein had no meaningful ties to al Qaeda, that the administration’s rhetoric about Abu Musab al-[tag]Zarqawi[/tag] was completely wrong, and that Iraq had no WMD program before our 2003 invasion.
But this partially obscured what wasn’t in the report. The Senate Intelligence Committee began a comprehensive investigation into pre-war intelligence towards the end of 2003. Initially, the committee was prepared to release one authoritative document on the intelligence, what it said, and how it was handled. Then then-Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) split the report in two — one on how wrong the intelligence community and agencies were (released before the 2004 presidential election) and another on how the White House used/misused/abused the available information (released after the 2004 presidential election).
Roberts has played fast and loose for years. First he said publicly that he’d “try” to have Phase Two available to the public before the 2004 election. He didn’t. Roberts then gave his word, in writing, that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee would have a draft report on controversial “public statements” from administration officials by April 5. He lied about that too. Then he indicated that he might just give up on the second part of the investigation altogether.
What we saw in September was two subparts of Phase Two — one that looks at what Ahmed Chalabi and other well-paid Iraqi exiles told the administration, the other that compares pre-war estimates of Iraq’s weapons capabilities with what U.S. forces actually found.
The rest of the report was kept hidden by Roberts, anxious to save the administration even more embarrassment. Of course, now Roberts isn’t in charge of the committee anymore, and Republican stonewalling will finally come to an end.
I don’t mean to play this up too much — chances are, the report will simply confirm much of what we already know — but it’ll be helpful to have more proof of administration abuses in the official record.