The Senate Intelligence Report white washes White House failures. Its 521 pages lack any mention of the Office of Special Plans. That's the Neo-con Chicken Hawk Pentagon panel set up to cherry pick through rumors and lies from suspected spy Chalabi to find bits and pieces that could bolster the bogus Bush/Cheney's case for war. Search for the word "special." You get zero hits. How can any report on intelligence failures omit the OSP? After nearly 1000 Americans died, 1000s more wounded and $billions of tax dollars spent, the Senate, Colin Powell, Bush's weapons inspector David Kay and so many others admit we went to war based on "bad intelligence." Everyone admits this was a botch job. Who should take the blame? The CIA? No, they - unlike the OSP - reported the lack of certainty Bush and Cheney ignored, so doesn't the buck stop with them? They blew it leading up to 9/11 and leading us into war. Enough Bush/Cheney failure! They showed they can't lead. We need qualified leadership.

AP "With the rising death toll and increasing fear that the United States lacks an effective plan for success in Iraq, lawmakers Tuesday start a series of hearings in which some hope to talk about how America got into the dangerous predicament and how it will get out."

"Bush announced that the last two members of the [Iraq Intelligence] Commission... will be Charles M. Vest and Henry S. Rowen. Charles M. Vest has served as President of MIT since 1990. Who is Henry S. Rowen? The San Francisco Chronicle has this to report: He is a member of the Defense Department's Policy Board, a 28-member panel that urged action against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein before the war. In 1997, he signed a 'statement of principles' calling for increased military spending, stronger ties to allies and stronger challenges to hostile regimes. The statement, calling for 'military strength and moral clarity' was signed by a conservative who's-who, including William Bennett, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. So, one member on the committee signed the Project for the New American Century's Statement of Principles, and is a member of the Policy Board - which was headed by Richard Perle. Talk about Bush having one of his own guys on the investigation."

"The White House is declining to make public the financial histories of the commissioners Bush appointed to investigate American intelligence failures... Citing an exemption to federal ethics regulations, the White House says the financial disclosure statements filed by the commission's nine members will remain confidential because they are not being paid for their work... Laurence H. Silberman, a conservative judge who is one of the commission's two chairmen, has drawn particular criticism from liberal groups because of his judicial record and close ties to the Bush administration [and his part in covering up Iran-Contra, and in playing a key role in the Rightwing's 'Get Clinton' efforts]... One commissioner, William O. Studeman... was a former official at the [CIA] and the National Security Agency and is now a senior executive at Northrop Grumman... Also on the panel is Lloyd M. Cutler,.. The firm he founded, Wilmer Cutler & Pickering, has done work for the Carlyle Group."

"Laurence Silberman, a retired judge nominated by the Bush administration as the co-chairman of the commission investigating pre-war intelligence on Iraq, was involved in a major cover-up during the Reagan era, his critics alleged yesterday. Mr Silberman sat on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which approved the expanded surveillance powers for the justice department under the controversial Patriot Act. President Bush named him as the senior Republican on a nine-member bipartisan commission examining how and why US intelligence had been so wrong about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. It will report next spring - well after the November elections. Democrats are sceptical about Judge Silberman's presence. Nan Aron, head of the Alliance for Justice, a liberal pressure group, said: 'This is not a statesman of the sort the president should be seeking to preside over this crucial and sensitive investigation.'"

LA Times: "The Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that it planned to investigate whether White House officials exaggerated the Iraq threat or pressured analysts to tailor their assessments of Baghdad's weapons programs to bolster the case for war... The move puts claims made by Bush and other senior officials in his administration squarely in the sights of the committee's investigation... The White House and Republican leaders in Congress had sought for months to confine the inquiry to the performance of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and to insulate the administration. But the Senate voted unanimously Thursday to expand the probe after some GOP members appeared ready to break from the Republican position."

From WSWS: "The third major link in the chain of lies underlying the intelligence failure cover story was enunciated by former US weapons inspector David Kay, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28: 'It turns out that we were all wrong.' In considering this argument, it is necessary first to place the 'mistakes' of the Bush administration in perspective. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, et al were not wrong on details, or in matters of degree. They repeatedly declared that they had positive proof that Saddam Hussein possessed hundreds of tons of chemical weapons, hundreds of thousands of liters of biological weapons, and a nuclear program capable of constructing a bomb in as little as a year."

"The public version of the U.S. intelligence community's key prewar assessment of Iraq's illicit arms programs was stripped of dissenting opinions, warnings of insufficient information and doubts about deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's intentions, a review of the document and its once-classified version shows. As a result, the public was given a far more definitive assessment of Iraq's plans and capabilities than President Bush and other U.S. decision-makers received from their intelligence agencies. The stark differences between the public version and the then top-secret version of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate raise new questions about the accuracy of the public case made for a war that's claimed the lives of more than 500 U.S. service members and thousands of Iraqis."

From WSWS: "[Another] Lie...: 'Bush was misled.' Were this claim true, it would of itself be sufficient cause to remove Bush from office, on grounds of criminal negligence and incompetence. A chief of state who propels his country into war on the basis of false claims of an urgent threat is not fit to rule. Moreover, the only serious response to such a debacle would be the initiation of an exhaustive criminal investigation into those people in high places who misled the president in order to foment war. In fact, the 'Bush was misled' ploy is just as threadbare as the 'no pressure' lie...The evidence is, by now, voluminous that Bush and his top advisers came to power with the determination to invade Iraq. What they lacked was a pretext. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, provided them with precisely the casus belli they had been seeking."

"Bush's new commission to review why the intelligence on Iraq misfired looks more like an effort to deflect attention until after the election than a genuine attempt to get to the bottom of the Iraq fiasco. Though dignified and bipartisan, the members lack the technical expertise to really unravel what was wrong with American intelligence and suggest how to fix it. And Mr. Bush withheld the mandate to get at the big political question they could answer: Did the administration hype intelligence to increase support for the war?"

AP: "Although a former Democratic senator and governor, Charles Robb of Virginia, will serve as the panel's co-chairman, Democrats say the panel cannot be truly independent if all nine members were selected by Republican Bush. 'We had an opportunity to have a truly independent commission that could have brought fresh eyes to the subject. Instead, we have a commission wholly owned by the executive branch investigating the executive branch,' House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said... Co-chairing the panel with Robb will be retired judge federal appeals Laurence Silberman, a Republican... Bush also named to the panel: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.; Lloyd Cutler, former White House counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton; former federal judge Patricia M. Wald; Yale University president Richard C. Levin; and retired Adm. William O. Studeman, former deputy director of the CIA."

Orcinus writes about Laurence Silberman, the GOP chair of the WMD commission: "He's not merely a conservative. He's a jurist who has a proven track record of making decisions, and enforcing policy, based not on the law, reason or basic principles of fair play, but purely on how they will benefit or harm the Republican party. 'Rabidly partisan' is an understated description. [His track record: played a central role in the 1980 'October Surprise' scandal; overturned the Iran-Contra conviction of Oliver North on specious grounds; tried to overturn the independent counsel statute on behalf Ted Olson, in a ruling overturned by the Supreme Court on an 8-1 vote; conspired to have Robert Fiske replaced as the Whitewater special counsel with Kenneth Starr. That Silberman] is now heading up this supposed probe tells us all we need to know in advance about its quality. This will not be a real investigation. It will be a whitewash. And no amount of spinning should convince anyone otherwise."

WSWS reports: "With the collapse of the edifice of lies used to justify the war in Iraq, the entire US political establishment has rallied around a new lie concocted to conceal the old ones -- namely, the assertion that an 'intelligence failure' is to blame for the false pre-war claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.... The appointment of retired federal judge Laurence Silberman as co-chairman, in particular, exposes the utterly fraudulent character of the investigation (i.e., whitewash) that the commission will conduct. Silberman, a long-time operative for the Republican right, is an old hand at covering up the crimes of Republican administrations."

Sidney Blumenthal writes, "The truth is that much of the intelligence community did not fail, but presented correct assessments and warnings that were overridden and suppressed... Precisely because of qualms the administration encountered within, it created a rogue intelligence operation - the Office of Special Plans, located within the bowels of the Pentagon. The OSP was under the control of neoconservatives; it roamed outside the regular interagency intelligence process, stamped its approval on stories retailed by Iraqi exiles that the other agencies dismissed as lacking credibility, and directly piped them into the president through the vice president's office... There was no general intelligence failure; on the contrary, there was a successful effort by the Bush administration to intimidate, subordinate and punish intelligence to fit its political objectives."

Before the war, Cheney and the neocon "pressured CIA analysts - not to mention George Tenet - to find more, more, more evidence of Iraq's WMD and of Iraq's (nonexistent) connections to Al Qaeda. They created a mini-intelligence unit inside the Pentagon, staffed by neoconservative ideologues such as Abram Shulsky and David Wurmser, to scour mounds of intelligence tidbits and extract incriminating evidence to prove what wasn't provable. They treated Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress as a virtual Oracle of Delphi, giving credence to the lying defectors and bogus intelligence he produced, even as the CIA warned that Chalabi was a fraud. They gave credence to the cockeyed theories of Laurie Mylroie, who believed not only that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 but that he was the mastermind behind Tim McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing, too. And, disregarding CIA warnings, they convinced Bush to say that Iraq was secretly trying to buy uranium for A-bombs in West Africa."

We, the taxpayers of America, spend over $30 billion each year on "intelligence." So what do we get for our money? In the case of Iraq, we got LIES. What happens when those lies are proven to be lies? The CIA screams "don't investigate us!" Actually, it's even worse than that: the CIA wants to be rewarded for its lies by being given even MORE power! Read this priceless comment by Douglas Jehl of the NY Times: "Many senior intelligence officials argue that Mr. Tenet and his successors really need more power, not less, to oversee the work of some 15 rival agencies, and more independence to make judgments without being guided by the White House." If the CIA rejects all responsibility and all accountability, then we taxpayers have no choice but to reject the CIA - shut it down and put the money into educating our children to be smarter than the braindead bozos in Langley.

"Bush, under mounting political pressure, will sign an executive order to establish a full-blown [yeah, sure!] investigation of U.S. intelligence failures in Iraq... By setting up the investigation himself, Bush will have greater control over its membership and mandate. The senior White House official said it would be patterned after the Warren Commission [whose report on JFK's assassination is believed by no one]... David Albright, a former weapons inspector, said the administration could use the commission as a way to delay judgments about the intelligence community and the administration's use of the intelligence information. 'The bottom line for them (the Bush administration) is to delay the day of reckoning about their use of the weapons of mass destruction information,' Albright said. 'David Kay can blame the CIA and say 'Oh, I made all these comments based on what I heard from the intelligence community.' Bush can't do that. He's the boss.'"

PentaPost report, "Angry about a leaked Democratic memo, the Republican leadership of the Senate yesterday took the unusual step of canceling all business of the committee investigating prewar intelligence on Iraq.Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) called on the author of the memo - which laid out a possible Democratic strategy to extend the investigation to include the White House and executive branch - to 'identify himself or herself ... disavow this partisan attack in its entirety' and deliver 'a personal apology' to Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence." The Dems have NOTHING to apologize for - the memo was completely straightforward in laying out Democratic options to get to the truth while the Republicans are trying to WHITEWASH the Bush's administrations treasonous manipulation of Iraq intelligence. The RepubliNazi stormtroopers are now on the march - will the media stop them?

From the Moonie Times: "Senior Senate Republicans said yesterday that unless Democrats disavow a plot to use the traditionally nonpartisan intelligence committee to wage political attacks on the Bush administration, they would consider taking away Democrats' power-sharing privileges. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, said that if Democrats expect cooperation from the White House in the investigation of intelligence failures that preceded the war in Iraq, 'they've got to stop the politics.' 'If they don't, I think we have to change the whole [nonpartisan] nature of the committee,' Mr. Santorum said [Dems.com note: 'nonpartisan' was added by the WashTimes editors]... Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Georgia Republican and member of the intelligence committee, said...'This has the potential to change the way the intelligence committee operates.'"

FOX's Sean Hannity has a mild blood pressure problem. Unfortunately he lost control of his blood pressure after a Republican staffer gave him a STOLEN copy of a draft Democratic memo. Somehow Hannity concluded that the DEMOCRATS are politicizing Iraq War "intelligence" - ROTFL!!! Apparently Hannity hasn't learned that there WERE NO WMD's IN IRAQ, and the administration POLITICIZED intelligence findings in order to SCARE Americans into war. When the intelligence community objected to Bush's POLITICIZED intelligence, Dick Cheney POLITICIZED the CIA by visiting Langley to threaten and intimidate the truthtellers. And when someone in the intelligence community - Joseph Wilson - had the guts to expose Bush's POLITICIZED Niger uranium lies, the White House outed his wife as payback, threatening her life and the lives of her covert sources. That's not just "repugnant" - that's TREASON. Hey Sean - you'd better get back on your meds, or your blood pressure might explode on the air!

Here is the STOLEN memo written by an unknown Democratic staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. When he revealed this STOLEN memo on TV, Sean Hannity screamed, "We are at war. I cannot believe that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has so politicized things. This is what this document is about, attacking the pResident. Not looking for an honest answer to honest questions, but politicizing the war while the commander in chief is leading our men and women and putting them in harm's way. I can think of nothing more repugnant than what I read here in this memo." We think this memo outlines the only strategy minority Democrats have for extracting the truth about Bush's Iraq War Lies. Read it for yourself - we report, you decide.

Some Republican staffer STOLE a draft memo written by a Democratic staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Now the RepubliNazis are screaming bloody murder about the memo they STOLE. The memo outlines 3 options the Democrats have for getting to the TRUTH about Bush's Iraq lies: 1) try to get the GOP majority to look for the truth (fuggedaboutit); 2) write a stinging dissent to the GOP whitewash; or 3) exercise the right of the minority to conduct an independent investigation. We would add several more options: 1) call upon Bush to tell the truth to the American people; 2) impeach Bush for lying to the American people and causing the needless deaths of hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqis.