Senate minority leader Harry Reid forced the senate to go to closed session today over pre-war intelligence and the lead-up to the Iraq war.
"I demand on behalf of the America people that we understand why these investigations aren't being conducted," Democratic leader Harry Reid said.
Taken by surprise, Republicans derided the move as a political stunt.
"The United States Senate has been hijacked by the Democratic leadership," said Majority Leader Bill Frist. "They have no convictions, they have no principles, they have no ideas," the Republican leader said.
Senator Frist is wrong here. They do have an idea: how to politically grandstand. The closed session is unusual, occurring only in extenuating circumstance. Like impeachment.
As I've noted previously, Senator Reid, one of only 100 such men and women in the country, has access to all the pre-war intelligence he wants. He doesn't want to "investigate." He wants a show trial with the Bush administration playing the role of defendant. He and his fellow Democrats couldn't get that with the Plame investigation, so he's stomping his feet and holding his breath in a political temper tantrum hoping he gets what he wants. He thinks the Libby indictment entitles the left to extrapolate and argue that every utterance of the Bush administration is suspect.
The problem is that the pre-war intelligence has already been investigated, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. If you go to the SSCI home page, right in front of you are links to the full report (521 pages!) or the summary of conclusions. Or you can look at PDF files broken down and labeled by section. A brief summary of the findings: The NIE (National Intelligence Estimates) in October 2002 appear to have been wrong as regards stockpiles and the status of the Iraq nuclear program.
Unfortunately that's Monday-morning quarterbacking, with the investigation and report produced well after the war had begun. The report was published in July, 2004. The NIE indicated that WMD programs were either ready to go or could be reconstituted quickly, and the CIA and other intelligence groups worked together in producing those assessments. In a post-9/11 world President Bush would have been negligent had he not acted upon these assessments if they had turned out to be accurate, with pressure eventually building to end sanctions from what we would later see were in-the-pocket security council members France and Russia.
If Senator Reid has something to say about the SSCI report, addressing specifics, let him say it. But today was just a stunt.
11/1/05 2005: A good read of similar mind: Rick Moran on this ridiculous stunt.
