Senate panel critiques prewar claims by White House
'Nobody is going to be happy' with the long-delayed report's mixed verdict on whether the Bush administration misused intelligence to argue for war with Iraq, an official says.
WASHINGTON — After an acrimonious investigation that spanned four years, the Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a detailed critique of the Bush administration's claims in the buildup to war with Iraq, congressional officials said.
The long-delayed document catalogs dozens of prewar assertions by President Bush and other administration officials that proved to be wildly inaccurate about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of banned weapons and pursuit of nuclear arms.
But officials say the report reaches a mixed verdict on the key question of whether the White House misused intelligence to make the case for war.
The document criticizes White House officials for making assertions that failed to reflect disagreements or uncertainties in the underlying intelligence on Iraq, officials said. But the report acknowledges that many claims were consistent with intelligence assessments in circulation at the time.
Because of the nuanced nature of the conclusions, one congressional official familiar with the document said: "The left is not going to be happy. The right is not going to be happy. Nobody is going to be happy."
The report helps culminate a series of investigations that the committee has carried out in connection with the war in Iraq. The "statements report" was stalled repeatedly, in part because of the complexity of the task but also because of partisan disagreements among senators.
The findings are likely to be a source of political discomfort for the White House by reviving the controversy over the Bush administration's case for war. That issue has largely faded from view on Capitol Hill at a time when the White House is sparring with Congress over other intelligence-related issues: CIA interrogation tactics and the scope of the government's wiretapping authority.
The report could also become political fodder for the presidential race, which has focused on the differing positions of the remaining candidates on the decision to invade Iraq.
Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee had initially pushed for the report to focus not only on the prewar claims of the Bush administration but also on statements made by members of Congress, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who is vying for her party's presidential nomination.
"The statements report is clearly the most political of all the reports the committee has done," said a senior committee aide. "It's inherently problematic to try to climb inside the heads [of policymakers] and know what they knew at the time."
