It seemed like a fairly big deal at the time.
Facing lingering questions about the nature of the prewar threat from Iraq, President Bush on Friday appointed a bipartisan commission to “figure out why” apparent intelligence failures regarding Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities occurred.
“We’re also determined to make sure that American intelligence is as accurate as possible for every challenge in the future,” Bush said during a brief news conference at the White House at which he named seven members — including three Democrats — to the commission.
And since? Pretty much nothing.
Nearly two months after President Bush named a bipartisan commission to look into intelligence failures on Iraq and weapons proliferation, the panel is only now beginning its work, a spokesman for the group said Thursday.
Just a handful of staff members have been appointed, and the newly designated executive director, John S. Redd, a retired vice admiral, is currently posted in Iraq as a deputy to L. Paul Bremer III, the chief civilian administrator, and will not begin work until May, the spokesman said.
It’s bad enough that Bush appointed a partisan ideologue like Laurence Silberman to head this “independent” commission, but it’s just as troubling that the commission is moving at such a glacial pace.
It is possible — just possible — that the commission is on a leisurely schedule so the massive intelligence failures about WMD won’t play as big a role in the upcoming election?
Dems on the Hill are hoping to pick up the pace a bit, highlighting the significance of having reliable intelligence.
With the commission not due to report until March, Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee called Thursday for Mr. Bush to move forward immediately with a series of reforms.
“We need the very best intelligence now,” the lawmakers said in a letter the president. “Time is not on our side.”
They said George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, had warned in testimony to Congress last month that “a serious threat” of terrorism against the United States “will remain for the foreseeable future” whether or not Al Qaeda remains in the picture.
In the letter, the lawmakers, led by Representative Jane Harman of California, the panel’s top Democrat, urged that Mr. Bush direct intelligence agencies “to scrub immediately” their estimates of illicit weapons programs around the world.
“The systemic analytic deficiencies” that plagued assessments of Iraq’s program, the lawmakers said, “could also have affected other estimates, including on the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran.”
For some reason, I’m a little skeptical about how fast the White House will respond to the Dems’ concerns.