The Congressional Research Service just issued a report stating that President Bush had access to more intelligence information than Congress did during its deliberations to grant the President authority to invade Iraq. This contradicts one of the statements the president and Vice President have been making for weeks that members of Congress knew what the White House knew. From today's Washington Post:  

Click here to read the whole report.

Yesterday, Vice President Cheney lashed out at Senators who have accused the White House of intentionally misleading the country into war.

What about purposely misleading the American people about purposely misleading them in the past? Would that be worse?

I thought it would be timely to dig up some old news about Ahmad Chalabi as he is in town this week meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley. This is from the New York Times, June 2, 2004:

Maybe this would also be a good time to pitch the report Common Cause did on the run up to the Iraq war and all of the things that were said and not said by administration officials before Congress and the American people. Ahmed Chalabi, of course, played no small part in this campaign to sell the war to the Americans. Chalabi was the head of the Iraqi National Congress, which considered itself the government in exile. Clearly it was in Chalabi's interest to convince the Americans to invade Iraq and dislodge Saddam Hussein. Not surprisingly, Chalabi has been tagged as the source of a lot of information that we now know to have been exaggerated or false about Hussein and his threat to the United States.

According to a Washington Post article out today, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Intelligence Committee cannot agree on the scope of the investigation into the administration's use of intelligence leading to the Iraq war. Remember, the Senate Democrats effectively shut down the Senate recently to protest the lack of progress on the so-called "phase II" of the Intelligence Committee's investigation of pre-war intelligence.

The Chairman of the committee, Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) says that the investigation will be limited to comparing administration officials' statements to intelligence reports to see if there is any disagreement. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) says the investigation should include asking the same officials if they were aware of any dissention in the intelligence community to the findings of an individual report.

I would characterize this as Senator Roberts simply extending the administration's tactics of weeding out bits of intelligence to support their campaign for war and then blaming the intelligence community when that intelligence turns out to be wrong - regardless of whether the intelligence community may have concluded that the intelligence was dubious. For example, we know that the CIA was highly skeptical of the information that was being gathered about Saddam's connection to Al Qaeda or his attempts to buy uranium from Niger. Yet, the administration trumpeted this information as gospel.

Senator Roberts has a particularly skewed understanding of congressional oversight. Roberts appears to believe that his role as Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is one of finding excuses for the administration's missteps, rather than holding the White House accountable. There is a wealth of information about the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney's efforts to "stovepipe" information to bypass regular intelligence vetting. As it turns out, some of the intelligence the White House received AS A RESULT of this process, was unreliable.

Now, Senator Roberts is going to fight to prevent a congressional review of this process by designing the investigation - which he has fought to kill for two years now - so that it will vindicate this form of intelligence gathering. Senator Roberts is doing this country a huge disservice by abdicating his responsibilities as a U.S. Senator and Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee by effectively signing off on this process and the disastrous results it has produced.

Only because individuals inside the White House may have broken the law are we seeing any accountability for the administration's twisting of intelligence to convince the American people, erroneously, that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the attacks of September 11. Congress, namely Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) who is Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has rolled over nicely for the administration.

In the end, it is not all that surprising. That is: the lengths to which the administration had to go in order to kill any dissention within the government. The problem all along was that not every employee in the federal government is a political appointee, so the President did not have the opportunity to install his cronies in every corner of the bureaucracy. The CIA, with all of its career professionals, always had doubts about the administration's claims about Iraq, and shared them with the administration. From today's L.A. Times:

How WE came to that conclusion?! The possible indictments of White House officials in the Plame case are just a byproduct of the administration's whole Iraq marketing campaign. A campaign that has included nothing less than the wholesale misrepresentation of facts by the President and Vice President, with statements like: "It's been pretty well confirmed..." No. It hasn't.

Maybe some individuals who work in the White House, even high-ranking ones like Karl Rove, will be found guilty of going too far in the administration's campaign to sell the war in Iraq by revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent to the press. That the possibility even exists seems indicative of the whole enterprise.

Update: From Roll Call's "Heard on the Hill" column...