Hardly The Whole Truth
By Mitch Berg
Ed and I briefly discussed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on the public-facing statements on Iraq before the invasion were substantiated by intelligence.
We briefly noted the myriad glossings-over and omissions that the majority party – the Democrats – wrote into the report.
Paul Mirengoff at Powerline kicked off a detailed, multi-part analysis of the report on Saturday. In concluding the first of several parts, Paul notes:
Committee Democrats attempt to finesse the fact that Democratic Senators as a group gave shorter shrift than the administration to the dissents contained in the NIE not only by limiting the report to statements by administration officials, but also by making misleading claims about congressional access to intelligence. They assert that members of Congress did not have the same ready access to intelligence as did senior executive branch policymakers. In fact, however, all of the intelligence analyzed in the Committee report was fully and readily available to members of Congress. Some of it was actually provided to members of Congress in closed hearings. Much of the remainder, including the NIEs, was widely disseminated to members.
Committee Democrats claim, though, that the NIE on Iraqi WMD was published “mere days” before Congress was scheduled to vote on the war resolution. Again, the Dems are attempting to mislead. The NIE in question was published nearly two weeks before the vote. Moreover, its key assessments had been presented to members of the Intelligence and Armed Services committees a month before the vote. Nor were these judgments new – numerous intelligence assessments had reached identical or similar judgments months earlier.
In any case, Senators Rockefeller, Dodd, Kerry, and the others (including Senators Clinton and Edwards) cannot defend statements they made about WMD following publication of the NIE on the grounds that they didn’t have enough time to study the document. If that were true, and it is not, they shouldn’t have opined on the issue, much less affirmatively claimed that there was no debate, as Dodd and Kerry (but not the administration) did.
Most irritating – the report, in giving massive weight to what were dissenting views within the international view (dissents that the noted Congressional Democrats largely didn’t accept until it became politically expedient), endorses a sort of “gotcha” politics, in which every dissent from the majority view that might in the future be born out can be retroactively applied to every decision made with good faith according to the then-prevailing view.
For political gain, of course.
Keep following Paul’s analysis.
