Ten
Silent Senators
By David Swanson
17 October, 2007
Afterdowningstreet.org
On
June 22, 2005, Democratic Senators Kerry, Johnson, Corzine, Reed, Lautenberg,
Boxer, Kennedy, Harkin, Bingaman, and Durbin sent the following letter
to the Republican Chairman and Democratic Ranking Member of the Senate
Intelligence Committee. The letter stressed the urgent need for an investigation
that over two years later has not been done. Only, now the Democrat
is Chairman of the committee, and the other 10 Democrats have gone as
silent as the dead.
June 22, 2005
The Honorable Pat Roberts, Chairman
The Honorable John D. Rockefeller, IV, Vice Chairman
United States Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence
SH-211
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Roberts and
Senator Rockefeller:
We write concerning your
committee's vital examination of pre-war Iraq intelligence failures.
In particular, we urge you to accelerate to completion the work of the
so-called "Phase II" effort to assess how policy makers used
the intelligence they received.
Last year your committee
completed the first phase of a two-phased effort to review the pre-war
intelligence on Iraq. Phase I-begun in the summer of 2003 and completed
in the summer of 2004-examined the performance of the American intelligence
community in the collection and analysis of intelligence prior to the
war, including an examination of the quantity and quality of U.S. intelligence
on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the intelligence on ties between
Saddam Hussein's regime and terrorist groups. At the conclusion of Phase
I, your committee issued an unclassified report that made an important
contribution to the American public's understanding of the issues involved.
In February 2004-well over
a year ago-the committee agreed to expand the scope of inquiry to include
a second phase which would examine the use of intelligence by policy
makers, the comparison of pre-war assessments and post-war findings,
the activities of the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG)
and the Office of Special Plans in the Office of the Under Secretary
of Defense for Policy, and the use of information provided by the Iraqi
National Congress.
The committee's efforts have
taken on renewed urgency given recent revelations in the United Kingdom
regarding the apparent minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting between Prime
Minister Tony Blair and his senior national security advisors. These
minutes-known as the "Downing Street Memo"-raise troubling
questions about the use of intelligence by American policy makers-questions
that your committee is uniquely situated to address.
The memo indicates that in
the summer of 2002, at a time the White House was promising Congress
and the American people that war would be their last resort, that they
believed military action against Iraq was "inevitable."
The minutes reveal that President
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified
by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy."
The American people took
the warnings that the administration sounded seriously-warnings that
were echoed at the United Nations and here in Congress as we voted to
give the president the authority to go to war. For the sake of our democracy
and our future national security, the public must know whether such
warnings were driven by facts and responsible intelligence, or by political
calculation.
These issues need to be addressed
with urgency. This remains a dangerous world, with American forces engaged
in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other challenges looming in Iran and North
Korea. In this environment, the American public should have the highest
confidence that policy makers are using intelligence objectively-never
manipulating it to justify war, but always to protect the United States.
The contents of the Downing Street Memo undermine this faith and only
rigorous Congressional oversight can determine the truth.
We urge the committee to
complete the second phase of its investigation with the maximum speed
and transparency possible, producing, as it did at the end of Phase
I, a comprehensive, unclassified report from which the American people
can benefit directly.
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