Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
Congress has finally been shamed into doing their constitutional duty regarding war. It would have been more appropriate to have done it before the war, but at this late date I’ll take what I can get. The Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will be conducting investigations on the use and possible abuse of intelligence information on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now we’ll see if the Senate Republicans can be trusted to honestly investigate the government or if they are merely readying the whitewash.
There has not been much public interest among Americans over the issue as yet, but that is likely to change. Once senior people start to appear in front of these committees - and invitations could potentially be sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others - there is likely to be more interest. Some of these hearings will be held in public and televised. There will be a lot of interest in seeing the administration, really for the first time, having to defend itself in public against the charge that it misused information and, in the extreme, made things up.
The makeup of the committees is interesting.
| Armed
Services Committee |
|
|
REPUBLICANS
John Warner, VA - Chair John McCain, AZ James M. Inhofe, OK Pat Roberts, KS Wayne Allard, CO Jeff Sessions, AL Susan M. Collins, ME John Ensign, NV James M. Talent, MO Saxby Chambliss, GA Lindsey O. Graham, SC Elizabeth Dole, NC John Cornyn, TX |
DEMOCRATS
Carl Levin, MI Edward Kennedy, MA Robert Byrd, WV Joseph Lieberman, CT Jack Reed, RI Daniel Akaka, HI Bill Nelson, FL Ben Nelson, NE Mark Dayton, MN Evan Bayh, IN Hillary Clinton, NY Mark Pryor, AR |
On the Republican side, John McCain is a wild card. Obviously, he is strongly pro-military and carries big credentials in military matters, but he also has a long-running antipathy toward Bush and if he comes to feel that military lives were put at risk on the basis of fraudulent intelligence, it's unlikely he would collaborate in a whitewash.
| Select
Committee on Intelligence |
|
| REPUBLICANS Pat Roberts, KS - Chair Orrin Hatch, UT Mike Dewine, OH Christopher Bond, MO Trent Lott, MS Olympia Snowe, ME Chuck Hagel, NE Saxby Chambliss, GA John Warner, VA |
DEMOCRATS
John Rockefeller IV, WV Carl Levin, MI Dianne Feinstein, CA Ron Wyden, OR Richard Durbin, IL Evan Bayh, IN John Edwards, NC Barbara Mikulski, MD |
Presidential candidate John Edwards needs press and this could be the golden goose. He supported the invasion, but has a good platform here to make waves over abuse of intelligence. Notable on the other side is Trent Lott, who, after being hung out to dry by the Bush administration, probably doesn't feel much inclination to help pull their chestnuts out of the fire, should it come to that.
The Democrats only need to stay united and peel off one Republican to prevail in these committees. In addition to McCain and Lott, each of Maine's "liberal" Republican senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, sit on one of the committees. Senators from both parties on each committee have been critical of the post-war reconstruction effort and seem to be experiencing pangs of buyer's regret. Especially if the situation on the ground in Iraq continues to deteriorate, these investigations could surprise people and actually uncover some truth.
Maybe the worm is starting to turn.
TrackBackcongratulations. "intelligence fisco" is at the tops at daypop at this moment.
jezebel
Posted by: jezebel at June 3, 2003 01:28 PMHate to say it, but opponents of the war are setting themselves up for another humiliation / marginalization on this one, too. The opposition argument is shaping into a "but you said they had WMD!; maybe they didn't because we haven't found any!" chant which can (will) be dismissed as soon as a single germ is found. The point is that yes, there were probably some agents of chemical or biological warfare there, but the blunt-knife-surgical and chaos-inducing "Regime Change" was the one most certain way to get any chem/bio weapons spirited away into lord-knows-whose hands. Any WMD that gets away into terrorist hands is becoming an EXCUSE for the hawks (watch carefully the words used in the media), not (in the minds of most Americans) evidence of blunder. Idiocy (if not insidiousness) on the part of the Administration, but ineptitude on the part of the Opposition; a familiar story to our Democracy.
Posted by: Froz at June 3, 2003 05:02 PMGotta disagree with you there, Froz. The issue is not that there are no illegal weapons in Iraq - it is how intelligence was manipulated. The CIA was dismissive of Saddam's nuclear capabilities and were very squishy on the chem and bio weapons. BushCo didn't like that assessment, so he set up an entirely new intelligence apparatus that would give him intel that supported an invasion, and used this to lead the nation into war.
It's not an issue of anybody being proven wrong post facto, but about knowingly lying beforehand in order to kill tens of thousands of people. And even with their conservative bias, the media will jump all over that. Bush has a rough ride ahead of him on this, especially if the slow drip of bodybags continues. If Blair loses his leadership position over this (which seems increasingly possible), that momentum will carry over to media coverage here.
This country has a long history of building up people into heroes then taking special glee in tearing them down later. Bush has crested; now come the brickbats. They can feasibly find a few petri dishes here or there, but stack it up against the menu read by GWB in the SOTU address (tens of thousands of liters of this, thousands of tons of that, weapons-grade uranium, etc.), and suddenly the rationale for invasion gets very, very flimsy and we're stuck there spending a billion dollars (and a couple of soldiers' lives) a week for as far as the eye can see.
Maybe this is all wishful thinking - I've been guilty of it before - but this storyline is too simple to get summarily dismissed.
Posted by: apostropher at June 4, 2003 09:43 AM"The issue is not that there are no illegal weapons in Iraq - it is how intelligence was manipulated..." And you've already lost most folks. From then on it goes WAY over there heads. How much do you trust this media (Fox and their slightly less odorous cousin, CNN) not to put more coverage on a vile or two of funny smelling chemicals in a bombed-out factory West of Baghdad than on some boring Congressional testimony.
"stack it up against the menu read by GWB in the SOTU address..." Again, I think you trust the American appetite for detail and complexity too much. Nixon only got busted because the Dem's HQ at their convention got burglarized, all fingers pointed to him and his cronies, and he couldn't deny it successfully. If they find bugs or poisons, they'll ride it out.
"knowingly lying beforehand in order to kill tens of thousands of people..." C'mon! no matter how soft BushCo's support might get - and I share your view that he's vulnerable in 2004, as is the Republican majority in both houses - no way more than 3% to 4% of the American public will buy that.
The spillover effect from our (almost only) ally 'cross the pond makes me lean more in your direction; I've only picked up on the story about his brewing storm in the last 24 hours...we'll see. But I still think that a "find" can be spun pretty hard and well by this gaggle. And I think the American public is still worried about another attack. "We find germs, then it was worth it; think about how many more would've died"
Posted by: at June 4, 2003 08:08 PM