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Row over pre war intelligence Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Row over pre-war Iraq intelligence continues
WASHINGTON, (Agencies): The credibility of President George W. Bush and the nation are at stake with the information that led the United States into the Iraq war, two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee say.
Investigations under way by the committee's staff, the CIA and the FBI marked a good beginning, Sens. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virgina Democrat, and Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, said Sunday on CNN's Late Edition.
Ultimately, the public needs to be reassured that, in fact, the intelligence the president was given (and) was used, and how he framed the debate and the decision to go into Iraq, was intelligence that they can have confidence in,- Hagel said.
And that's, by the way, important for the world to have that same confidence in our word.A crucial question will be to determine how Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28 came to include a reference to what US intelligence had determined was an incorrect British report that Iraq was shopping for uranium in Africa.
There are plenty of investigations, and the question is, what's the point of them?- said Rockefeller, the intelligence committee's vice chairman. The point of them is to find out if we were being misled, if somebody inserted that in despite earlier objections by CIA Director George Tenet.
On Fox News Sunday,-Rockefeller said Bush could make the controversy go away by coming clean whether the justification for war was exaggerated. It's just a question of was it right, or was it wrong? he said.
Rockefeller said the argument should not be personalized or politicized. Because of Bush's policy of maintaining the right of pre-emptive attacks against potentially dangerous governments, he said, intelligence is the basis now of war-fighting.
Therefore, Rockefeller said, it's very important to intelligence to say that facts really do matter, they count, they have to be accurate.
Senator Bob Graham, a candidate for president in next year's elections, said Bush must have known the information was considered dubious in US intelligence circles.
You cannot tell me that the vice president (Dick Cheney) didn't receive the same report that the CIA received, and that the vice president didn't communicate that report to the president or national security advisers to the president.
So I have to believe that the president knew or should have known that this information had been classified as unreliable by the CIA,he told CBS.
Senior Senator Carl Levin hit out at Bush on Saturday in the Democratic response to the president's weekly radio address.
The statement that Iraq was attempting to acquire African uranium was not an inadvertent mistake. It was negotiated between CIA and National Security Council officials, and it is highly misleading, Levin said.
The key question is whether administration officials made a conscious and a very troubling decision to create a false impression about the gravity and imminence of the threat that Iraq posed to America, he said.
Unless we address the objectivity and reliability of US intelligence before the Iraq war, our government's warnings about future security threats will be greeted with skepticism,Levin added.
It will be more difficult to gain the support of the American people and our allies for any action if they question the credibility of our intelligence,- he said.
The Washington Post on Sunday reported that Bush had twice, in September 2002, used another assertion not approved by the CIA that Saddam Hussein could launch a biological or chemical attack in 45 minutes.
Meanwhile, Democrats said Sunday they will launch a new television ad in Wisconsin accusing President George W. Bush of misleading Americans on the threat from Iraq.
Republicans warned broadcasters not to air the ad, scheduled to start Monday in Wisconsin, calling it deliberately false and misleading.
The Democratic National Committee has been raising money through an e-mail campaign that started July 10 to help pay for an ad that sharply questions Bush's veracity on Iraq's weapons.
The ad says: In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush told us of an imminent threat.- America took him at his word.
The video shows Bush saying, Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
The ad continues: But now we find out it wasn't true.
A year earlier, that claim was proven false. The CIA knew it. The State Department knew it. The White House knew it.
But he told us anyway.
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