Investigation Summer

June 15, 2004

It isn’t going to be a happy summer for Bush administration intelligence and military officials. The number of investigations is proliferating so rapidly, with many reports scheduled to be released this summer, that the White House may look back on the first half of 2004 as the “good old days,” despite the hammering Bush has already taken.

There are almost too many inquiries to count. There are several investigations of U.S. intelligence in connection with Iraq, the 9/11 commission is finishing its work, the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame investigation is proceeding, there are several panels looking at the Abu Ghraib scandal, investigators are examining who leaked what to Ahmed Chalabi, there is Halliburton dirt to be revealed and more. In normal times, any one of these would be enough to knock the pins out from under a president, but taken together it’s a blitzkrieg.

First to explode, it seems, will be  the (apparently) soon-to-be-released report on Iraq WMD and U.S. intelligence by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The CIA and the White House have been dragging their feet on this one, trying to purge information from it on national security grounds—but more likely on Bush re-election grounds. Reports Reuters :

The CIA has nearly finished declassifying a highly critical report about prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and returned most of it to Congress on Monday with parts it believes should be kept secret marked in brackets, government sources said.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report examines one of the main reasons used by the United States for going to war against Iraq—intelligence that said Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction. No large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons have been found.

The committee will meet on Tuesday behind closed doors to discuss the report including its conclusions and the CIA's redactions. The panel was expected to vote on whether to approve the roughly 400-page report.

The 9/11 panel, whose report ought be released at the end of July, will also hammer Bush and the CIA, generating a wave of headlines that—no matter what subtleties there are—will portray Bush as having goofed by not mobilizing America after he got the warning  that Al Qaeda was plotting. (You can read about the commission’s work here.) Reports AP :

The Sept. 11 commission holds its 12th and last hearing Wednesday and Thursday… The commission, which faces a July 26 deadline for its final report, is winding down its 1 1/2-year investigation in which it interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, including Bush, and reviewed more than 2 million documents.

Meanwhile, one of many looks into the Abu Ghraib mess—this one chaired by former S©ecretary of Defense James Schlesinger—has reportedly interviewed top intelligence officials at the Pentagon, including Stephen Cambone, who controls a $30 billion empire of intelligence technology, satellites, secret Special Forces units, and gosh-knows-what:

In a statement, the panel confirmed it conducted more than a half dozen interviews and its chairman, former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, vowed the members would ``provide an unvarnished assessment of how these abuses happened."

The panel didn't identify the individuals it interviewed Monday. But an official familiar with the investigation said members met with the Pentagon's intelligence chief Stephen Cambone; Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, the Army's provost marshal general; Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commands U.S.-run prisons in Iraq; and Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade implicated in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, given the sensitive nature of the investigation.

John Kerry, who specialized in investigations in the Senate (meanwhile forgetting to legislate anything), must be marveling at the irony: official investigators are going to help elect him this summer.