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Friday, March 5, 2004

This Washington Post article calls for the commission on intelligence to study the use the information was put to:

Study of Rhetoric On Iraq Is Urged - Kay: Panel Should Check for Distortion

David Kay, the former chief U.S. arms inspector in Iraq, said yesterday that President Bush's new commission on intelligence should study how the president and his senior policymakers used the information they received from intelligence agencies.

"The charges are out there," Kay said during a talk at the U.S. Institute of Peace, "and if there was misuse or distortion, we need to know it." He added that he did not believe that was the case and that he was told to "find the truth" when he was given the job of searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Bush's executive order creating the commission last week spelled out the panel's areas of inquiry, and did not list among them the question of whether the administration accurately portrayed the information in intelligence reports. The panel was directed to investigate prewar intelligence collection and the analysis of deposed president Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and to compare that analysis with what has since been found by the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies....

Why should a panel be appointed by a President to investigate whether that President and his administration "accurately portrayed the information"? Isn't that the very definition of a political question? And wouldn't that by definition lead to a panel who's conclusions are bound to be so bound up by politics as to be useless? How about just getting us what information is available and letting we, the people, figure things out for ourselves. Washington doesn't need yet another panel pinching out politicized conclusions.

1 Comment

It's looking more and more like David Kay has a hidden agenda. Did he ever mount a serious effort to look for WMD's? It's just amazing that GWB's judgment has failed him so thoroughly in the selection of David Kay for the WMD hunt and Tom Kean for the 9/11 commission. He may yet pay a price at the November polls for his misjudgments.

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