For the past four years, ever since U.S. arms experts failed to turn up weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Washington insiders have been uneasy and divided about the Select
Senate Committee on Intelligence’s long-promised answer to the last and most fundamental question about the White House rush to war. Did senior Bush officials, from the president, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on down, knowingly or deceitfully manipulate, distort or “twist” intelligence to justify invading Iraq?

After its long-awaited final report last week, the Senate intelligence committee, one of Congress’s most powerful oversight and investigative bodies, issued a resounding “maybe,” unable to come to a conclusive judgment despite reams of evidence produced by previous official government reports and independent probes since the war began.

The committee’s collective spasm of indecision was the legacy of bitter partisan infighting that has gripped the committee since the Republican congressional supermajority was elected in November 2002. Now, six years later, the losers are the American people, a badly weakened intelligence oversight system, and a struggling
U.S. intelligence community badly in need of  resuscitation.

Clarity eluded the prestigious Senate committee. We have long known – and the White House has long admitted – that top Bush officials repeatedly made statements about Saddam’s WMD and ties to terrorists that were not “substantiated by existing intelligence”. Three years ago, in fact, the current committee chairman, Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller (D-WVA), rejected the premise of this report, arguing that comparing official statements to the existing intelligence at the time “does not alone tell the story.”

He had good reason. Anyone who read past the introduction of the 2004 Senate intelligence report, the 2005 Robb-Silberman commission report on WMD, or countless other documents, saw repeated evidence of the Bush administration undercutting the CIA and Defense
Intelligence Agency and circulating alternative intelligence to policymakers to support its war aims.

Rockefeller, as vice-chairman of the Senate committee in 2005, vowed to conduct interviews with senior officials and if necessary “issue subpoenas” to get to the bottom of the
intelligence debacle that Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Powers now calls “one of the great cautionary tales of American history.”

Inexplicably, that never happened. Even an intriguing second committee report about secret Rome meetings in 2001 between Bush defense department officials and Iranian dissidents, left out one central player, Italian defense intelligence chief Nicolo Pollari. The Italian spymaster is suspected by investigators of helping Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghobanifar set up the meetings and providing the Pentagon with the infamous forged Niger intelligence that surfaced in the president’s 2003 State of the Union speech.

The best Sen. Rockefeller could do last week was to deliver his personal assurances that the Bush White House “led the nation to war on false premises.” That may have given war critics some satisfaction, but a similar indictment is nowhere to be found in the report’s findings. Of the Senate report’s 16 major conclusions about the statements made in five major speeches by top Bush officials, fully ten were purportedly “substantiated” by existing intelligence,
even if some were exaggerated, distorted, or later modified.
Yet even these ten statements turned out to be flat wrong, for reasons that had little to do with formal U.S. intelligence assessments. The trumped-up intelligence that made liars or dupes of senior Bush officials, more often than not, was the work of their own neoconservative cronies and enablers – whether in the famous case of the aluminum tubes, the
strategic threat of Iraqi drones, or charges that Saddam possessed biological and chemical WMD programs.

In the end, the 16 conclusions of the Senate intelligence committee boiled down to 16 brokered deals in search of an elusive political balance.

The remarks of key committee members at the end of the report make it easy to understand why. The committee’s deliberations were steeped in bitter partisan discord. Rockefeller archly noted that his Republican vice-chairman, Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond (R-MO), the latest White House point man on intelligence matters, forced more than 300 revisions in the final text, unsuccessfully pressed for many more, and in the end “was unable to support these two remaining reports.”

Bond, for his part, veered between petulance and paranoia, complaining that Republicans had been frozen out of the proceedings and expressed anxiety “about the damage that this report will do.” He dismissed the report “a waste of time,” yet objected that top Bush officials were not provided the courtesy of personal interviews. Leery Democratic staff suspected Bond wanted more time to run out the clock on the investigation.

After four years of highly politicized strife within the committee – reflecting the take-no-prisoners, don’t-ask don’t-tell battle over intelligence that has marked the Bush war effort – this once-powerful symbol of effective Congressional oversight is all but dysfunctional. Next to the Iraq war itself, the breakdown of the Senate intelligence
committee is one of the most damaging legacies of the Bush years, rendering ineffective a critical counterweight to executive branch overreach and monitor of the intelligence community.

The effective collapse of the committee comes at a time the U.S. spy business is reeling from smouldering dissension over the Iraq war – and now, over Iran – as well as lack of leadership and an exodus of experienced agents. Seasoned analysts and agents have been stripped from the CIA and gone to work for the Director of National Intelligence, a product of the Bush showcase reforms, or left government for more lucrative private intelligence and security firms. Meantime, a surfeit of inexperienced recruits still lacks the language skills and trade craft to recruit agents who can operate effectively in a new world of lethal threats.

The intelligence oversight process sorely needs presidential and congressional leadership. Until then, the casualties will be ongoing executive grabs for judicial and legislative power, a full official public accounting of how and why the U.S. went to war in Iraq – and a wounded intelligence community, which must be revitalized if American policymakers are going to have the strategic intelligence to prevail in the war on terror.