If It's Friday...

A couple months back, I was driving around and listening to Air America's Randi Rhodes, who noted that Saturday's newspaper -- the least read issue of the week -- is actually the most important edition. Why? Because Friday is the BushCo Administration's favorite day to release important news that could be construed as disappointing or embarrassing, and they know that there's a good chance the news will get lost in the 24-hour cycle.

So it wasn't too surprising to see that the long-awaited "Phase II" portion of the investigation into pre-war intelligence failures (from the Senate Intelligence Committee, and slowly dragged out by Senator Pat Roberts; for a refresher, check out this previous post from last November) got released this afternoon to little fanfare. I saw a reference pop up to it in my RSS reader and I actually did a double-take like in a Warner Bros. cartoon.

Well, it seems it's not the full Phase II investigation, just a newly declassified report (as noted by the WaPo), but it gets to the meat of the matter: Saddam Hussein had no links to al Qaeda or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Here's more from Salon's War Room:

The revelation, such as it is, comes in a nearly 400-page report on a portion of the Intelligence Committee's investigation into prewar intelligence and the manipulation thereof. As the length of the report suggests, there is a good deal of new detail here. Among other things, the report reveals for the first time that a CIA assessment in October 2005 concluded that Saddam "did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates."

Dick Cheney and George W. Bush repeatedly argued that there was linkage between Saddam and Zarqawi; indeed, Bush said in October 2004 that "Zarqawi's the best evidence of a connection to al-Qaida affiliates and al-Qaida." The president continued to invoke Zarqawi's name in suggesting a Saddam-9/11 linkage as late as March 2006 -- which is to say, six months after the CIA had concluded that Zarqawi had no relationship with Saddam.

Sen. John Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, says the new report shows how the Bush administration "exploited the deep sense of insecurity among Americans in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, leading a large majority of Americans to believe -- contrary to the intelligence assessments at the time -- that Iraq had a role in the 9/11 attacks."

The NYTimes adds:

The C.I.A. report also contradicted claims made in February 2003 by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who mentioned Mr. Zarqawi no fewer than 20 times during a speech to the United Nations Security Council that made the administration’s case for going to war. In that speech, Mr. Powell said that Iraq “today harbors a deadly terrorist network" headed by Mr. Zarqawi, and dismissed as “not credible" assertions by the Iraqi government that it had no knowledge of Mr. Zarqawi’s whereabouts.

The panel concluded that Mr. Hussein regarded Al Qaeda as a threat rather than a potential ally, and that the Iraqi intelligence service “actively attempted to locate and capture al-Zarqawi without success."

Another tasty tidbit comes from the McClatchy news service (formerly Knight-Ridder... I still like that name better):

The report was released along with a second one that said false information from the exile group Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, was widely distributed in prewar intelligence reports and used to support intelligence assessments about Iraq's weapons and links to terrorism. Intelligence officials repeatedly warned that the INC was unreliable, but White House and Pentagon officials ignored the warnings.
[...]
While many committee Republicans dismissed the INC report's conclusions as unsupported by the facts, two of them, Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, voted for harsher language that Democrats proposed.

The report, which ran 211 pages, disclosed that three months after the White House approved continued funding for the INC's intelligence collection in July 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency warned that the group "was penetrated by hostile intelligence services," including Iran's. It's unclear whether top White House officials were aware of the warning.

The report also confirms a report by McClatchy Newspapers that former CIA director R. James Woolsey helped get an INC defector attention from the U.S. government by referring him to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Linton Wells.

The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, suggested that he had knowledge of dozens of sites related to weapons of mass destruction, but none of them were ever found, and Haideri, taken to Iraq in early 2004, couldn't identify the facilities that he claimed he knew about.

In summing it up, the NYTimes editorial from Saturday says it best:

Unfortunately, the documents — only two of the five parts of the final report — are beside the big point of this inquiry: Did Mr. Bush and his aides knowingly hype the intelligence on Iraq and deliberately mislead Americans into war?

The first phase of the committee’s investigation listed countless ways in which the intelligence agencies messed up before the war, but drew no conclusions about how Mr. Bush used the flawed intelligence. That question was put off until after the election of 2004, and Mr. Roberts did his best for another year to make sure it would never be answered.

When Democrats forced him to resume the investigation, Mr. Roberts re-engineered the inquiry into a five-part series and orchestrated the process so that the verdict on the actions of Mr. Bush and his team will now not be rendered until after yet another election season is over this fall.

Mr. Roberts has consistently defended his actions by saying he was trying to conduct a careful investigation. But yesterday, he denounced Democrats for “insisting that they were deliberately duped into supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

“That is simply not true,” Mr. Roberts said.

So much for not prejudging the outcome. If Mr. Roberts has an investigative report supporting that conclusion, we’d sure like to read it.