Sr Dems on Intel Com. Urge Completion of Investigation into Pre-War Claims

[kerrygoddess]

Senior Democrats on Intelligence Committee Urge Prompt and Thorough Completion of Investigation into Pre-War Claims
November 4, 2005

Washington, DC – U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) joined Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.), a fellow member on the Committee, today to urge that the panel complete its long delayed investigation into the possible misuse of intelligence to boost the case for war in Iraq.

The three Democrats also sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) documenting the lack of progress in the investigation and urging that the Committee “keep its pledge to the Senate and the American people and answer the difficult yet necessary questions about the production and use of our pre-war intelligence.”

“We believe that only by promptly producing a thorough and complete report will the Committee fulfill the promise it made to the American people and help answer the troubling questions surrounding the use of intelligence in the months leading up to our Nation’s decision to go to war. America needs to know whether the public statements of policymakers before the war were substantiated by the intelligence,” the Senators wrote.

A copy of the letter can be found here.

The following is the statement delivered by Senator Feinstein today at a news conference in the Capitol with the other two Senators:

“Prior to the closed session of the Senate this week, there was almost no progress being made in these issues. I wrote Senator Roberts a letter at the end of July urging work on Phase II. I never got a response to that letter.

In that letter, I suggested that the Committee examine very troubling questions about how intelligence was produced and used, including how heavily the intelligence community weighed information provided by the Iraqi source CURVEBALL on mobile biological laboratories; as you can all recall, the Secretary of State went before the Security Council of the UN with information provided by four discredited human sources.

And secondly, the revelations in the so-called ‘Downing Street Memo’ that the ‘intelligence and facts were being fixed’ to justify war in Iraq.

Other examples include:

· The intelligence on whether Iraq was seeking UAVs capable of delivering biological weapons, which the Air Force disputed;

· The claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, which the State Department (INR) disputed;

· The claim that aluminum tubes were being procured for nuclear centrifuges, which the Department of Energy, the Department of State, and the experts in the Defense Department disputed; and

· The claim that Iraq was working with al Qaeda to attack the United States, which was not supported by available intelligence.

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