The "Phase II" Battle
There's a battle brewing on the floor of the Senate over "Phase II" of the Congressional inquiry into Iraq's WMD's and the intelligence used to justify the invasion (link here). Whereas the first Senate inquiry examined the intelligence itself, this second phase will concentrate on the use of the intelligence by the administration and determine if the White House distorted facts or lied regarding Saddam's WMDs.
Minority Leader Harry Reid earlier today forced a rare closed session of Senate in an attempt to stop what he saw as stalling tactics by Republicans regarding this probe. The second phase of the inquiry, which has been delayed for a year and a half, should now move ahead after Reid's tactic to kick-start the Senate into action. Republican Leader Frist and some of his GOP colleagues have said that this was nothing but a "stunt" by Reid, and that the inquiry has been underway for some time now and is making progress.
I personally think that this probably was just a stunt by Reid to make it look like he was doing something to move the inquiry forward, however I can't really blame him since it seems his action will have the desired effect. It is long past due for a complete investigation of Bush's policies of exploiting questionable intelligence before the war. The truth has been right in front of us for some time now, in that Cheney and Rumsfeld had re-organized the entire system of intelligence vetting before the war. This resulted in large amounts of raw, unverified intelligence being available to high-level officials from which Bush and his administration could cherry-pick the intelligence despite the unreliability of a great deal of the intelligence. And of course the Downing Street Memo said in plain English that the reason they would want to do all this was because they were "fixing the intelligence around the policy."
Even granted all this, there are a good number of people who won't believe anything until the Senate comes out with some "official" report to "set the record straight," as the 9/11 commission did (though that report was very much lacking in a number of areas). This inquiry could be the thing to finally boost Bush's obvious lies and exaggerations into the national consciousness so that someone might be held responsible. It would be a nice change to see someone held accountable for the multiple failures surrounding the war in Iraq, but I won't hold my breath.
Minority Leader Harry Reid earlier today forced a rare closed session of Senate in an attempt to stop what he saw as stalling tactics by Republicans regarding this probe. The second phase of the inquiry, which has been delayed for a year and a half, should now move ahead after Reid's tactic to kick-start the Senate into action. Republican Leader Frist and some of his GOP colleagues have said that this was nothing but a "stunt" by Reid, and that the inquiry has been underway for some time now and is making progress.
I personally think that this probably was just a stunt by Reid to make it look like he was doing something to move the inquiry forward, however I can't really blame him since it seems his action will have the desired effect. It is long past due for a complete investigation of Bush's policies of exploiting questionable intelligence before the war. The truth has been right in front of us for some time now, in that Cheney and Rumsfeld had re-organized the entire system of intelligence vetting before the war. This resulted in large amounts of raw, unverified intelligence being available to high-level officials from which Bush and his administration could cherry-pick the intelligence despite the unreliability of a great deal of the intelligence. And of course the Downing Street Memo said in plain English that the reason they would want to do all this was because they were "fixing the intelligence around the policy."
Even granted all this, there are a good number of people who won't believe anything until the Senate comes out with some "official" report to "set the record straight," as the 9/11 commission did (though that report was very much lacking in a number of areas). This inquiry could be the thing to finally boost Bush's obvious lies and exaggerations into the national consciousness so that someone might be held responsible. It would be a nice change to see someone held accountable for the multiple failures surrounding the war in Iraq, but I won't hold my breath.
posted by Dan at 4:56 PM
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