Bush wants intelligence inquiry to go beyond Iraq

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	David Kay
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WASHINGTON — The special commission President Bush plans to create to investigate intelligence failures in Iraq would also probe U.S. intelligence mistakes in other nations and would not be expected to complete its work until well after the presidential election, a senior administration official said yesterday.

The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Bush would issue an executive order within days creating a panel to look at the failure of intelligence agencies to adequately gauge the threat of weapons of mass destruction not only in Iraq, but also in North Korea, Libya and other countries that have or are seeking nuclear weapons. Both North Korea and Libya appear to have been more advanced in their nuclear programs than intelligence officials realized.

The official said the bipartisan panel, which would include intelligence experts and members of Congress, would have until next year to report its findings — well after the November presidential election.

Bush's plan for a White House-sponsored investigation would short-circuit calls for a more independent inquiry focused solely on Iraq, one that potentially could prove an embarrassing source of controversy in an election year.

By setting up the investigation himself, Bush would have greater control over its membership and mandate.

Democrats have pushed for an investigation that would also look into allegations that administration officials put pressure on intelligence analysts to exaggerate the evidence for Iraq's weapons programs and misused intelligence information to make the case for war.

However, top U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, who resigned recently, said he had found no evidence to support such claims.

"I deeply think that is the wrong explanation ," Kay said last week in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Kay said he had "numerous (intelligence) analysts come up to me in apology" for their inaccurate pre-war assessments. Not one, he said, had complained of "inappropriate command interference."

Bush has publicly rebuffed calls for an investigation, saying he wanted to wait for the final results of the weapons search in Iraq.

"I want to know the facts," the president said Friday, admitting no flaw in the weapons allegations. "And I want to know exactly. I want to compare what the ISG (Iraq Survey Group) finds with what we thought going in."

Kay has said the U.S. search for weapons is about 85 percent complete. He led the effort for nine months.

Experts in the field

In appointing the commission, Bush is expected to draw heavily from intelligence experts who are familiar with the problems in the field, the White House official said. The investigation would be independent and be provided with the resources it would need to do its job, the official said.

The panel would be patterned after the Warren Commission in the 1960s, which looked into President Kennedy's assassination. That commission, headed by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., chairman of the House intelligence committee and a former CIA case officer, said recently partisan politics would make it impossible for a commission to get any real work done before the election.

"Not this year," said Goss. "You couldn't get the members together or even the rules set up."

Although Kay says he continues to support the war in Iraq, he has been among the most vocal in calling for an independent investigation into pre-war intelligence.

In a television interview yesterday, he said the intelligence failures in Iraq completely undermine Bush's pre-emptive strike doctrine, which calls for first-strike attacks against enemies believed to be a threat to the United States.

"If you cannot rely on good, accurate intelligence that is credible to the American people and to others abroad, you certainly cannot have a policy of pre-emption," Kay said on "Fox News Sunday."

At least three prominent Republican senators — John McCain of Arizona, Trent Lott of Mississippi and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska — have called for an investigation.

"We need to open this up in a very nonpartisan, outside commission to see where we are," Hagel said yesterday. The issue is not just shortcomings of U.S. intelligence, he said, but "the credibility of who we are around the world and the trust of our government and our leaders."

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., agreed. "America's credibility's at stake," Biden said yesterday. "This isn't about politics anymore."

Asked whether it was time for such a commission, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., replied: "Absolutely." There were no reports of reaction from other Democratic presidential hopefuls.

Hans Blix, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq whose failure to find weapons of mass destruction before the war was ridiculed by the administration, has said the White House is generating a fog of uncertainty around Kay's stark findings and potentially softening a harsh public judgment by postponing indefinitely what he said was Bush's need to admit error.

"They aren't giving up," Blix said recently. "They all prefer to retreat under a mist of controversy rather than say, 'I'm sorry, this was wrong,' "

David Albright, another former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, said the administration could use the commission as a way to delay judgments about the intelligence community and the administration's use of the intelligence information.

"The bottom line for them (the Bush administration) is to delay the day of reckoning about their use of the weapons-of-mass-destruction information," Albright said.

"David Kay can blame the CIA and say 'Oh, I made all these comments based on what I heard from the intelligence community.' President Bush can't do that. He's the boss."

Albright said he disagreed with anyone who claims the president is blameless or that anyone who had the intelligence at Bush's disposal would have reached the conclusion war was warranted.

"I was so involved in the whole debate (over weapons of mass destruction), and it's just not true," he said.

Bush has lately found many of his rationales for the war in Iraq being challenged.

Just as Kay has undermined the weapons-of-mass-destruction rationale, a report published by the Army War College challenged the notion that the war in Iraq was part of the overall war on terrorism, while the group Human Rights Watch has disputed Bush's notion that the Iraq war was a humanitarian mission.

The alternative for Bush — admitting an error in the pre-war allegations — has not worked well for him in the past.

Administration officials now say it was a mistake to acknowledge Bush should not have included in last year's State of the Union address an allegation that Iraq tried to buy nuclear material in Africa.

The admission of error, they say, made Bush appear weak and encouraged more skeptical coverage than if the White House had refused to budge.

One supporter of Bush's invasion of Iraq predicted the American public will almost certainly forgive any flaws in the rationale for going to war if the on-the-ground situation improves in Iraq, with violence abating and U.S. troops returning home. Since the invasion, 524 U.S. troops have died in Iraq.

Traction control

"If people feel things are under control in Iraq, the WMD issue doesn't have traction," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "If things go badly, then it does have traction."

Before deciding to endorse an independent review, White House officials had little alternative but to rely on some unsatisfying answers when asked about the intelligence failure.

For example, Bush suggested Wednesday that war came because Saddam Hussein did not let inspectors into Iraq, when it was the United States that called for inspections to end. "It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in," Bush said.

That same day, Bush press secretary Scott McClellan said the White House never said Iraq was an "imminent" threat. But when McClellan's predecessor, Ari Fleischer, was asked if Iraq was an imminent threat, he replied: "absolutely"; when White House communications director Dan Bartlett was asked if Saddam was an imminent threat to U.S. interests, he replied: "Well, of course he is."

Bush aides have regularly insisted they were following the advice of intelligence experts.

National-security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Thursday said the weapons conclusion "was the judgment of our intelligence community, the judgment of intelligence communities around the world."

Yet the White House, at times, went beyond what the CIA advised.

In addition to the allegation about Saddam's nuclear purchases in Africa, which the CIA discouraged, the White House asserted, without consulting with the CIA, that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given."

In their efforts last week to blunt the issue, though, White House officials were careful not to say the intelligence was wrong.

Invited to do so in a television interview with CBS News on Thursday, Rice replied: "I don't think ... that we know the full story of what became of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."

Those close to the White House said that, now that Bush has backed an independent review, there is no need for an immediate revision of that official position.

Compiled from The Washington Post, Knight Ridder Newspapers and The Associated Press.

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