ver the course of the last few days, President Bush has named the committee that will investigate the intelligence gatherers and whether any incorrect information led to our war with Iraq.
Before I go any further into this, I want to relay a few facts about this commission just so we all can be clear about what this commission is about.
-The President appointed this committee himself.
-Aside from William Studeman, a former deputy director of the CIA and director of the National Security Agency, no member on this committee has any background in the intelligence community.
-None of the conclusions from this committee are going to be made before the November election.
Does anybody see anything wrong with this?
To me, it looks like there is something rotten in our nation’s capital.
One of the first things that is striking about this committee is what exactly they are going to investigate, but more importantly, what they are not going to investigate.
The goal of this committee, as reported by the Washington Post, is to “study the information about Iraq that was available to the White House before the war, in an effort to determine whether an intelligence failure contributed to Bush’s as-yet-unproved assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.”
Fine, but what is missing, I believe, is the most important thing. This is to say that the committee is not investigating how this information was going to be used. What if in March of 2005, when the committee’s report is due, it shows that the intelligence was good, but the use of it was bad?
For Bush, this is pretty much a win-win situation. If he loses the next election, the next president is left to clean up the Iraq intelligence mess. If Bush wins, he might take a few hits, but me thinks more blame will be assessed to his advisors. Plus, since he would have already won re-election, do we think he would really care?
To take away from the credibility of this committee even more is that the members of this committee are having their qualifications deeply scrutinized.
Also from the Washington Post, “Loch K. Johnson, a Political Science professor at the University of Georgia and an authority on the CIA, said he is disappointed that the panel members “have not been deeply involved in contemporary intelligence issues. Where are the people who know about intelligence but have no axes to grind or institutional biases to reflect?” he said. “I don’t see those people there.”
So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: “Is this administration capable of putting together a fair investigative committee to investigate themselves?” This motley crew was put together by the same man (Bush) who authorized the use of push polls in South Carolina during his campaign in 2000 to suggest that his opponent (Senator John McCain who is also, coincidentally, a member of this committee) had fathered an illegitimate black child. Classy, no?
Of course the answer is no, and really to be fair, could we say that any president, Republican or Democrat, would authorize a fair and balanced investigation into themselves? Doubtful at best I do believe.
My only wish is that when this investigation is being conducted, is that there is a serious look into the people that were using this information to make important decisions and ask some serious questions about said leaders.
Were this president and his cabinet dead-set on war with Iraq from day one in office?
Did they knowingly use incomplete intelligence to make a case for war?
Was Saddam Hussein ever a real threat?
Was it weapons of mass destruction or the possibility of one day having weapons of mass destruction?
I want to end this with a passage from the June 5, 2003, Washington Post:
“Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq’s weapons programs and alleged links to Al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush Administration’s policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials,”
If you close your eyes, you can almost see our president covering his own butt.