Citing new report, Dems rip ‘heinous’ prewar rhetoric

Democrats blasted the Bush administration’s rhetorical road to war in Iraq as “heinous” Thursday, citing a new Senate Intelligence Committee report that said the administration mishandled prewar intelligence.

However, senators stopped short of pressing for criminal charges, and the White House shot back that the report was old news.

{mosads}A pair of Intelligence Committee reports released earlier Thursday said Bush administration officials gave biased and incomplete assessments of Iraq’s threat to the U.S. and inappropriately tried to implicate Iran as a threat to national security.

Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and fellow Democrats Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said the reports show Bush and others deliberately shaded or ignored facts in favor of rushing the country into war.

“The tragic fact is, on issues of war and peace, which should require the most meticulous and the most precise adherence to the truth, the administration was too often careless with its words, including in some cases making presentations that were not substantiated by the available intelligence — or worse, directly contradicted by the available intelligence,” Rockefeller said. “The administration went well beyond what the intelligence community knew and what it believed.”

Rockefeller said Democrats would not formally prosecute the point against the administration because doing so would automatically shut down relations between the legislative and executive branches.

“It would mean nothing else, whether it’s clean air or FISA, would get done,” he said. “It’s like pressing for impeachment. It’s a grand act with only five or six months to go. It’s a futile act and it’s a wrong act, because we do have business to do. Should it be done in the wide sweep of history? Yes. Should it be done by us, now? No.”

White House press secretary Dana Perino told reporters that the report partially vindicates the administration on some points but otherwise simply rehashes old claims that the administration has already acknowledged.

“This has been a subject that has been gone over many, many, many times, and I don’t know of anything that’s particularly new in it,” Perino said. “We’ve answered that and that we had the intelligence that we had, fully vetted, but it was wrong. And we certainly regret that and we’ve taken measures to fix it.”

Republican committee members pushed back by saying the committee’s report itself was actually “flawed, incomplete and irrelevant.” 

Ranking Republican Kit Bond of Missouri called it “political theater… that makes partisan points but isn’t grounded in fact.” Meantime, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Orrin Hatch of Utah said the GOP was largely left out of the process.

At the same time, the senators acknowledged that the intelligence relied on by the administration was incorrect.

“We worked hard to straighten out the intelligence,” Bond said. “I have never defended the intelligence. That was wrong.”

Still, Bond said Bush and his officials never conspired to misuse the information, and that the committee’s report to the contrary was only intended as a campaign tool for Democrats.

“That’s what it was meant to do, I’m sure,” he said. “I don’t know why they’re trying to run against the Bush administration. Maybe they think it’s good. But unfortunately it denigrates the process of intelligence collection, analysis and oversight and that’s why it’s a very shabby example of how partisan politics can be misused in the intelligence community.”

The reports were backed by a bipartisan majority with GOP Sens. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia Snowe (Maine) crossing the aisle.

“We endorse the critical and consequential information released today as the final chapter of our inquiry into pre-Iraq War intelligence. As we have repeatedly said, we firmly believe the process should be as transparent as possible to empower the public to arrive at their own conclusions,” they said in a joint statement. “We expect future administrations to learn from this comprehensive review and avoid making similar mistakes. While the process by which the Committee drafted and approved the reports could have been significantly improved, their release is important, if long overdue.”

The first examined whether statements from administration officials were backed by intelligence, while the second “details inappropriate, sensitive intelligence activities conducted by the DoD’s Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, without the knowledge of the Intelligence Community or the State Department.”

The report on executive statements focuses on five speeches by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in late 2002 and early 2003, as well as a variety of statements to the media. The report’s conclusions said those statements were “generally substantiated” by U.S. intelligence, but did not convey “substantial disagreements” or different interpretations that many officials had at the time. Some speeches and statements were backed up, but others, such as claims of a link between Iraq and al Qaeda, were not.

The report on the Pentagon policy teams focuses on a special group within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy that was tasked with gathering intelligence on Iran and Iraq. Over eight conclusions, the report says that the group performed shoddy work, such as an inappropriate meeting with Iranian exiles in Rome in December 2001 in an attempt to prove a terrorism case against Iran, and that Defense officials did not adequately investigate the intelligence that was gathered.