A Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday that concludes the Bush administration used false information on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to lead America into war follows a secret plan hatched by Committee Democrats last year to damage President Bush's re-election prospects.
"Most of the major key judgments" on the Iraqi weapons threat were "either overstated, or were not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting," the Committee report said. "A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of intelligence."
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While Republican Committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts emphasized that the fault lies primarily with the CIA, ranking Democrat Sen. Jay Rockefeller did his best to turn the report into an indictment of the White House, claiming without evidence that Bush officials pressured the intelligence community.
Interviewed this weekend on "Meet the Press," for instance, the West Virginia Democrat complained: "Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. - they were putting out these hair-raising, paralyzing, horrifying statements about what was going to happen, was about to come back to the homeland, the mushroom cloud. This is pressure, folks. This is pressure."
The report's conclusions were just what the doctor ordered for Democrats, who plotted last year to unleash as much damaging information as they could once the presidential campaign heated up.
"Our plan is as follows," a still unidentified staffer for Sen. Rockefeller wrote in a confidential memo obtained by radio host Sean Hannity in November.
"Pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead to major new disclosures regarding improper or questionable conduct by administration officials."
The names of Bush officials cited by Sen. Rockefeller on "Meet the Press" were among those targeted in the document, which became known as "The Hannity Memo."
"The chairman [Roberts] has agreed to look at the activities of the office of the Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, as well as Secretary Bolton's office at the State Department."
The Democrat memo continued:
"We may have already compiled all the public statements on Iraq made by senior administration officials. We will identify the most exaggerated claims. We will contrast them with the intelligence estimates that have since been declassified. Our additional views will also, among other things, castigate the majority for seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry."
The Hannity memo's summary section leaves no doubt about the Democratic plan to turn the Iraq intelligence controversy into a political weapon.
"We have an important role to play in revealing the misleading, if not flagrantly dishonest, methods and motives of senior administration officials who made the case for unilateral preemptive war," the anonymous Rockefeller strategist wrote.
"The approach outlined above seems to offer the best prospect for exposing the administration's dubious motives."
In more evidence that Sen. Roberts allowed his Democratic colleagues to control the investigative agenda, key weapons discoveries in Iraq were either downplayed or ignored in the Committee's report, including:
The discovery of two tons of low-enriched uranium at Saddam Hussein's massive al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons plant, which, according to U.S. scientists, could have been refined to make at leat one nuclear bomb.
The discovery of hundreds of tons of unenriched uranium at the same location.
More than a dozen artillary shells containing sarin and mustard gas, uncovered in just the last month.
Thirty state-of-the-art Soviet-built fighter aircraft found buried beneath the sand near Baghdad last July.
A fleet of Iraqi al-Samoud II missiles with a range of 93 miles - far in excess of the range allowed under the first Gulf War cease fire agreement.
A terrorist camp complete with a Boeing 707 fuselage where radical Islamists reportedly trained to hijack U.S. aircraft before Sept. 11.
A list of suspects harbored by Iraq's government that reads like a who's who of global terrorism, including 1993 World Trade Center bomber Abdul Rahman Yasin, notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, Achille Lauro hijacker Abu Abbas and al-Qaida kingpin Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who was treated for leg injuries in a hostpital run by Saddam's son Uday.
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