Senate Probe

Senate to probe how case for war was made

Democrats' gambit revived a long-delayed Senate inquiry.

By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - By moving the Senate into a secret session for two hours this
week, Democrats put a politically charged question back on the table: Did the
Bush administration exaggerate the case for war against Iraq?

Emboldened by last week's indictment of former top White House aide I. Lewis
Libby, Democrats Tuesday used an obscure parliamentary rule to capture the
Senate floor. In doing so, they infuriated Republicans but won a timetable to
complete a long-delayed Senate investigation of whether the White House
manipulated the intelligence used to justify invading Iraq.

An earlier phase of this probe, completed in July 2004, offered a searing
critique of prewar intelligence estimates. Its conclusions were amplified in
a report by the 9/11 commission the following month. Together, these reports
spurred legislation to reform US intelligence agencies.

But neither review examined whether government officials tendentiously misused
intelligence. Democrats argued for months that this element - not just
reviewing failures of the intelligence community - must be part of the
committee's oversight responsibility.

Now, so-called Phase 2 would investigate whether public statements, testimony,
and reports by US government officials were supported by available
intelligence. It would also probe whether a Pentagon policy group under
Douglas Feith ginned up the case for war, preempting other intelligence.

From the start, the panel has been stymied by disagreements.

Democrats wanted the probe to focus on Mr. Feith's activities, as well as some
350 statements by Bush administration officials during the period after 9/11.
Republicans expanded the scope to include members of Congress and claims by
officials in the Clinton administration. This expanded list of comments,
cited without attribution to avoid bias, were then matched up against
available intelligence. Senators, not staff, were to evaluate whether the
comments were justified, according to Sen. Pat Roberts (R) of Kansas, who
chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

"I must tell you at this point that some of those statements [by lawmakers and
Clinton-era officials] are even more declarative and more aggressive than
those made in the [Bush] administration," he said on the floor of the Senate
on Tuesday. Once the committee started down that road, "we didn't get very
far," he added.

Democrats dispute that version of events, calling the investigation "moribund"
and a whitewash. "Any time the intelligence committee pursued a line of
inquiry that brought us close to the role of the White House in all of
this ... our efforts have been thwarted," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D) of
West Virginia, the panel's vice chairman.

Rarely is a senatorial disconnect as pronounced as this one - a sign of how
politicized oversight has become in the GOP-controlled Congress.

The Senate Intelligence committee was established as a bipartisan check on
abuse of the intelligence agencies by the executive branch. That's why the
top Democrat is labeled "vice chairman," instead of "ranking member," as in
other committees.

But in recent years, the Senate intelligence committee has become increasingly
polarized along party lines. Leak of a Democratic strategy memo calling for
using the prewar intelligence probe to embarrass the president in the 2004
elections didn't help. The two chairmen ceased communication for months.

Despite better public relations, that mistrust still dogs the panel's work,
especially over an issue as sensitive as possible political manipulation of
intelligence estimates.

"There are many Democrats who want the Senate to serve its historic function
as being the arena where controversies can be discussed and investigated,
such as Watergate and Iran-Contra," says Julian Zelizer, a congressional
historian at Boston University. "The big difference is that those two
scandals were when we had divided government; now, we have united government.
So Democrats are turning to other tools, such as instigating a secret
session, to put the heat on Republicans, especially Republican moderates, to
at least think about investigation," he adds.

Critics assailed the tactic as a cheap trick to seize the agenda at a time
when President Bush is gaining momentum after his nomination of Samuel Alito
to the Supreme Court and his plan to contain bird flu. Democrats insist that
the risky - and apparently successful - gambit was necessary to hold the Bush
administration accountable.

"We're finally going to ... have Phase 2 of the investigation regarding how
the intelligence was used to lead us into the intractable war in Iraq," said
Democratic leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada.

Republicans say there will be areas of substantial agreement when the report
is released. For example, Senator Roberts told reporters that the Phase 2
probe of prewar claims about postwar Iraq, which predicted a humanitarian
crisis, rather than an insurgency, will take a hit for being as deeply flawed
as the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.