December 6 was a busy news day.
The Iraq Study Group issued its report, to which President Bush,
barely hiding his annoyance, promised a formal response before
Christmas.
December 6 was a busy news day.
The Iraq Study Group issued its report, to which President Bush, barely hiding his annoyance, promised a formal response before Christmas.
Robert Gates was confirmed the same day as secretary of defense.
And there was a third bit of news that went virtually unnoticed, butwhich may ultimately overshadow both. The Bush administration quietly announced the withdrawal of the nomination of David H. Laufman to be the next inspector general at the Department of Defense.
The significance of this is part of the history of the Senate
Intelligence Committee’s probe into the alleged manipulation of prewar intelligence about Iraq. Remember that? Most people thought that issue was settled, or perhaps buried. But with the November election it is again very much alive. Here’s why:
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s first report, on July 9, 2004, focused entirely on the effectiveness of the intelligence agencies, and did not – claims by administration supporters to the contrary notwithstanding – touch on the sensitive issue of whether the intelligence was manipulated by the administration.
In February 2004, before the first report was released, the committee agreed to put that off until after the November, 2004 election, when it would consider five areas of inquiry to be known collectively as Phase Two.
– The use by the intelligence community of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress.
– The pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs and links to terrorism and how they compared with post-war reality.
– Pre-war intelligence assessments about post-war Iraq.
– Public statements and testimony about Iraq made between the Gulf war and Operation Iraqi Freedom by U.S. government officials, and whether they were substantiated by intelligence.
– Intelligence activities relating to Iraq by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, headed by Douglas Feith and the group he created there: the Office of Special Plans.
This was the core of Phase Two. The OSP, created by Feith and his boss, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, is thought by many in and out of government to have been a gang of ideologues whose purpose was to manipulate intelligence to provide the justification for a fight with Iraq. Feith left over a year ago to become a distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, who will take over the chairmanship of the Senate Intelligence Committee next month, has accused Feith of fabricating and exaggerating intelligence about WMD and alleged Iraq-al-Qaeda connections in the run-up to the war, wants to know if any of its activities were unauthorized or in violation of the National Security Act and other laws.
After the election, Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, stalled. A frustrating year later, on Nov. 1, 2005, Democrats invoked Senate Rule 21, forcing a closed session to hash out the matter.
From that session emerged new, if short-lived, momentum to the investigation. But in a surprise move, the Pentagon agreed on Nov. 17 to start its own investigation into Feith’s activities. The following April, 2006, Sen. Roberts announced that he was delaying his committee’s investigation into the fifth element of Phase Two, about Feith and the OSP, until the Defense Department’s inspector general had completed his investigation.
But that was not to happen anytime soon. In June, Inspector General Joseph E. Schmitz, informed he had become the subject of a congressional investigation himself, announced his resignation, effective Sept. 9, to take a job with a defense contractor. President Bush nominated Laufman, who had a reputation as a Bush family fixer, to replace Schmitz, but Levin blocked the nomination until after the election.
Meanwhile, on Sept. 8, 10 months after the Rule 21 closed session, the Intelligence Committee finally produce it first Phase Two report.
Unfortunately, only the first two of the five points were covered. Points three and four were promised soon. But then came the election, and with it Rumsfeld’s ouster, Gates’nomination, and ultimately, the withdrawal of the Laufman nomination.
The question now becomes: Will Gates get an inspector general who will end the stonewalling of the Feith/OSP investigation and advance the core purpose of Phase Two? If Levin pursues his own investigation, will Gates cooperate with the Democrat-controlled Intelligence Committee to get to the bottom, at long last, of the question of whether or not the Bush administration manipulated prewar Iraq intelligence to get us into this disastrous war?
