Is the Senate trying to blame the CIA for the intelligence lapses?

Senate Panel to Fault Iraq Intelligence-Newspaper
Friday, October 24, 2003 9:21 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is preparing a highly critical report faulting CIA Director George Tenet, among others, for overstating the prewar weapons and terrorism evidence against Iraq, the Washington Post said on Friday.

The report will follow criticism last month from lawmakers in the House of Representatives who charged the intelligence agency with "significant deficiencies" in collecting information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and alleged ties to al Qaeda.

The United States justified going to war against Iraq largely because of a supposed threat from Iraq's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs, but no such weapons have been found.

The top Democrat on the committee, however, said the report was far from finished.

"We still have a lot of work to do before we can make any judgments about the accuracy of our prewar intelligence and we must continue to review how that intelligence was used by administration policy makers," West Virginia Sen. John Rockefeller said in a statement earlier in the week.

Democrats hoping to take President Bush's place after next year's elections have seized on the issue of whether his administration pumped up the case for war, as well as his handling of the conflict and its aftermath.

Members of the Senate committee's staff were surprised by the amount of circumstantial evidence and single-source or disputed information used to write intelligence documents summarizing Iraq's capabilities, the Post said, citing Republican and Democratic sources.

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, told the Post "the executive was ill-served by the intelligence community," adding that the information was sometimes "sloppy" and inconclusive.


Original Story

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There's no mention of Rumsfeld's special intelligence office in the Pentagon, which, if I'm not mistaken, was responsible for gathering much of the 'evidence' in support of war, over the protests of the CIA.

My understanding is that the White House went outside the CIA in gathering the intelligence, and is now trying to blame the CIA.

Why, then, would Democratic senators go along with this?

Or am I totally missing the point of this article?

And their lack of inquiry into the info Shrub presented.
Duckie

would they have an interest in shifting blame away from the WH...

You'd think Senators, at least, would have learned the most basic fact of life in D.C. You don't piss off the CIA.

First, Shrub and Rummy ignore them and ramble on about all the lies we are all too familiar with.

Second, "le whore Novak" bends over and spreads his cheeks so "senior administration officials" can use him to out a once-covert CIA agent.

Third, the Senators expect the CIA to sit quietly by while their agency gets blamed for all of Shrub's fuckups since 9/11.

Well....

I just love it. That's right, fellas, you go pile on the CIA. Don't you worry about starting up your cars, or taking long airplane flights. It's all okay. You guys are the government, right? Who'd dare take a shot at you?

Heh, heh, heh...

Though I'm not sure that pissing off the CIA is in the Repukes best interest....

War hard-on.

Those Republicans, the party of responsibility.....if this had been the Clinton administration, we'd be in the sentencing phase of the post-impeach treason trial now.

Sorry Pat, et al.....we ain't talking ancient history here.....we know that this was Bush's war and that his PNAC friends in the OSP were distorting the information bigtime to serve your war agenda and distraction from 9/11.

Now we also know that Norquist/Rove have a lot of baggage to hide about their ties to Saudi terrorists....I bginning to understand why they needed to distract the American public from investigating 9/11. I'm also understanding that Dimson was speaking "off the cuff" when he told us we'd be investigating the financial trail of Al-Qaeda....I imagine Grover and Karl set him straight about that right after the speech.

Except for President Dumbo, the Wonder Idiot.

They've got dirt on all the administration members, and they can MANUFACTURE dirt when none exists, and mount a smear campaign that makes Clinton's 8 years of hell look like a walk in the park.

They need to take the kid gloves off and get bloody, figuratively.

The Dem senators haven't gone along. The Post story says they're not done yet.
The Professor