Cross-posted at The Next Hurrah
Walter Pincus tells us the "Sissy Six" are making progress. The six Senators tasked with planning Phase II of the investigation on pre-war intelligence are close to agreement on the scope and plan for the investigation.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday worked out a tentative arrangement for pursuing its inquiry into how the Bush administration publicly portrayed the intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, with Democrats saying they expected some officials to be called to testify before the review is completed.
There are extensive quotes from DiFi explaining that they're going to look into the intelligence that went into the SOTU and Powell's UN Speech.
One example of the work ahead, Feinstein said, would be
analyzing President Bush's statement in his 2003 State of the Union address saying the British government had learned that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa.
"We are not looking to place
blame," Feinstein said, "but if the president said something like the 16 words on uranium, somebody put them in there, and we want to know what [intelligence] there was before" the speechwriter. She suggested that Robert Joseph, then the National Security Council staff member
supervising preparation of the Iraq weapons material in the speech and now undersecretary of state for arms control, might be the type of witness called to testify.
As another example of what she thought should be covered, Feinstein pointed to intelligence covered in then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the U.N. Security Council. He mentioned reports of several Iraqi programs -- later proved incorrect -- including allegations that Iraq had mobile factories for making biological agents, which came from a source known as "Curveball" who had been flagged by a CIA station chief as unreliable. "There was discrediting information in the mill at
the time, and we want to find what went to Powell," Feinstein said.
But what DiFi doesn't say is whether they'll get into the drafts of those documents. Her office says only,
At a news conference last week, the Democratic members said they were interested in getting the material that Libby contributed. At this time, unfortunately, I can't tell you whether this material will be turned over.
There's some debate about whether there are early drafts of the SOTU that named Niger and a quantity of yellowcake. Alan Foley said there were in his testimony before the Senate Committee on Intelligence. And Condi mentioned such early drafts in a press conference the week before the Plame leak. But the SSCI never got to see those early drafts. Instead, they had to take Robert Joseph's word that early drafts didn't include references to Niger.
There's less debate whether there were early drafts of Powell's speech. Indeed, Murray Waas not only tells us there were early drafts, but he tells us why the SSCI didn't receive those drafts: Scooter Libby, with the assistance of David Addington, refused to turn them over, against the counsel of the White House.
Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers,decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.
Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.
The drafts of these documents, more than the finished speeches, will reveal how the Bush Administration (save Powell) was twisting intelligence. Indeed, they'll delineate precisely what the Bush Administration wanted to claim--and what the CIA and Powell's staff removed during the vetting process. By looking at the drafts, then, we'll know precisely how the Administration--as opposed to the CIA--politicized intelligence.
Getting the White House to turn over documents was one of the issues that turned the first phase of the probe into such a nasty issue in the first place. I have no great hope the White House is going to be any more forthcoming now than they were two years ago (although, Scooter Libby isn't around to obstruct the Senate's investigation anymore). But if the committee can't get the drafts of these speeches, they're only skimming the surface. The real evidence of how the White House politicized intelligence is bound to be in those early drafts. Which is why we're probably never going to learn about them.