posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Lee:
I wonder what all these Iraqi sources were getting in return.

---

posted                      

quote:

---

Amid heckles, Mr Blair joked: "I somehow feel I am not being entirely persuasive in certain quarters."

---

posted                      

quote:

---

Fears over WMD were a cornerstone of the government's case for war with Iraq.

But the prime minister said on Wednesday he had not known what sort of weapons were being referred to at the time of the Commons vote on 18 March 2003.

---

quote:

---

Tory foreign affairs spokesman Michael Ancram said later Mr Blair's response raised "serious questions about what the government knew when Britain went to war with Iraq".

---

posted                      

quote:

---

Bush sets narrow limits on inquiry
Critics urge broader scope for Iraq panel

WASHINGTON -- President Bush has established a narrow charge for his new independent commission on U.S. intelligence capabilities, directing the panel to focus on flawed prewar intelligence assessments of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and other nations.

But the commission may quickly find itself pressured to explore broader events and discussions that formed the tangle of spy data and policymaking leading up to the March 20 invasion of Iraq.

Those uncharted lines of inquiry that administration critics are urging the group to address include:

- The role of Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff, including Cheney's visits to the CIA to review intelligence reports and his trips to Capitol Hill to describe, in closed briefings, the prewar dangers posed by Iraq.

- The role of George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, who in an impassioned defense of his agency and its work Thursday said Bush "gets his intelligence from one person and one community--me."

- The reliance on questionable human sources, including Iraqi defectors and foreign opposition leaders, who had much to gain from U.S. intervention.

- The role of the Pentagon, especially its consumption of intelligence reports by newly established groups such as the Office of Special Plans, which was formed to plan for postwar Iraq. Like Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a strident proponent for ending the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein, once saying of Iraq's weapons: "We know where they are." Rumsfeld explained to the Senate last week that he meant the U.S. knew where Iraq's weapons sites were located--not the weapons themselves.

- The objections raised by those within the administration, particularly at the State Department, where a good bit of the intelligence on Iraq was discounted as untrustworthy.

Stephen J. Hedges, The Chicago Tribune

---

quote:

---

Well, the fix, as they say, is in.

Here's the executive order the president just signed authorizing his commission which he "established for the
purpose of advising the President in the discharge of his

constitutional authority under Article II of the Constitution to conduct foreign relations, protect national security, and command the Armed Forces of the United States, in order to ensure the most effective counter-proliferation capabilities of the United States and response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the ongoing threat of terrorist activity."

The commission doesn't appear to have any subpoena power, only the right to "full and complete access to information relevant to its mission as described in section 2 of this order."

If I read this right -- and needless to say I'm no lawyer, notwithstanding that summer in grad school I wasted prepping for the LSAT -- what's 'relevant' is at the discretion of the department heads of the various executive branch agencies.

And if you read the "mission" as defined in the order it seems narrowly framed as looking at pre-war CIA analyses (actually the whole Intelligence Community) and how they stack up against what Kay's guys found on the ground after the war.

Anything the White House did with those CIA analyses, any fisticuffs between the Veep's office and the CIA, anything stovepiped through Doug Feith's operation at the Pentagon, anything that made its way from Chalabi's mumbo-jumbocrats to the the president's speechwriters -- that's all beyond their brief.

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo

---

quote:

---

QUESTIONING THE COMMISSION'S SCOPE: The President's decision to only support a WMD commission whose scope may be limited and which only reports after the election is facing serious criticism. AP reports, "Current and former U.S officials said they fear that Bush will try to limit the inquiry's scope to the CIA and other agencies and ignore the key role the Bush administration's own internal intelligence efforts played." The officials "said that intelligence efforts led by Vice President Dick Cheney magnified the errors through exaggeration, oversights and mistaken deductions." Similarly, Knight-Ridder reports current and former officials said, "What went wrong with intelligence on Iraq will never be known unless the inquiry examines secret intelligence efforts led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon hawks." Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wrote to Bush that, "One of the major questions that needs to be addressed is whether senior administration officials, including members of the Cabinet and senior White House officials, misled Congress and the public about the nature of the threat from Iraq...Even some of your own statements and those of Vice President Cheney need independent scrutiny." Former weapons inspector David Kay, with whom the President met yesterday, agreed, saying, "the commission should look into everything."

QUESTIONING THE COMMISSION'S INDEPENDENCE: The Pelosi-Daschle letter also raised serious questions about why the White House says the commission will be independent yet is appointing all of the commissioners itself. The letter said, "A commission appointed and controlled by the White House will not have the independence or the credibility necessary to investigate these issues." Joseph Cirincione of the non-partisan Carnegie Endowment for Peace "said the commission would not be truly bipartisan or independent because Mr. Bush would appoint its members and define its scope." He said, "I just spoke to the staff of 30 senior Democrats and none of their staff have been consulted on this panel. The President is trying to dig a defensive line to stop the damage. If he does it right, the commission can help him but, if he does it wrong, it will make it worse."

The Center for American Progress, The Progress Report

---

posted                      

quote:

---

Michael Howard said Lord Butler's interpretation of the inquiry's terms of reference were "unacceptably restrictive".

---

quote:

---

His argument was not with the remit agreed for the inquiry but with Lord Butler's interpretation of it.

The Lib Dems have already declined to take part in the review because they thought its guidelines too narrow.

Mr Blair called the inquiry after mounting pressure caused by the failure to find any WMD stockpiles in Iraq, the American decision to hold an inquiry and the remarks of former weapons inspector David Kay.

At the time the Tories believed its remit covered the way intelligence was used before the war, saying that meant politicians' actions would be investigated.

But the inquiry committee later made clear it would concentrate "principally on structures, systems and processes rather than on the actions of individuals".

---