Hillary's War

[seafan]

Hillary’s War

This article is a preview of this weekend's Times Magazine.


By JEFF GERTH and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Published: May 29, 2007

On a Thursday afternoon in early May, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton rose before a nearly empty Senate chamber and proposed that Congress undo one of the most significant acts in its recent history: the authorization of the Iraq war. In remarks lasting just two minutes, she spoke bluntly: The “authorization to use force has run its course, and it is time to reverse the failed policies of President Bush and to end this war as soon as possible.” She added, “If the president will not bring himself to accept reality, it is time for Congress to bring reality to him.”

This was Clinton’s latest and boldest attempt to distance herself from her own vote for the Iraq war in October 2002 — a vote she has described as “probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make.”

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As she had always done, Clinton prepared for her decision on the war vote by doing her homework, or what she has called her “due diligence.” This included, she said, attending classified briefings on Capitol Hill concerning intelligence on Iraq. Indeed, Clinton was far more prescient than many of her Senate colleagues about the potential difficulty of rebuilding the country. In a number of private meetings with top Bush officials, according to people in the room, Clinton asked pointed and skeptical questions about how the administration planned to deal with the inevitable challenges of governing Iraq after the invasion.

But it’s not clear that she was equally diligent when it came to the justifications for the war itself. So far, she has not discussed publicly whether she ever read the complete classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate, the most comprehensive judgment of the intelligence community about Iraq’s W.M.D., which was made available to all 100 senators. The 90-page report was delivered to Congress on Oct. 1, 2002, just 10 days before the Senate vote. An abridged summary was made public by the Bush administration, but it painted a less subtle picture of Iraq’s weapons program than the full classified report. To get a complete picture would require reading the entire document, which, according to a version of the report made public in 2004, contained numerous caveats and dissents on Iraq’s weapons and capacities.

According to Senate aides, because Clinton was not yet on the Armed Services Committee, she did not have anyone working for her with the security clearances needed to read the entire N.I.E. and the other highly classified reports that pertained to Iraq.

She could have done the reading herself. Senators were able to access the N.I.E. at two secure locations in the Capitol complex. Nonetheless, only six senators personally read the report, according to a 2005 television interview with Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia and then the vice chairman of the intelligence panel. Earlier this year, on the presidential campaign trail in New Hampshire, Clinton was confronted by a woman who had traveled from New York to ask her if she had read the intelligence report. According to Eloise Harper of ABC News, Clinton responded that she had been briefed on it.

“Did you read it?” the woman screamed.

Clinton replied that she had been briefed, though she did not say by whom.

The question of whether Clinton took the time to read the N.I.E. report is critically important. Indeed, one of Clinton’s Democratic colleagues, Bob Graham, the Florida senator who was then the chairman of the intelligence committee, said he voted against the resolution on the war, in part, because he had read the complete N.I.E. report. Graham said he found that it did not persuade him that Iraq possessed W.M.D. As a result, he listened to Bush’s claims more skeptically. “I was able to apply caveat emptor,” Graham, who has since left the Senate, observed in 2005. He added regretfully, “Most of my colleagues could not.”

On Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2002, Senate Democrats, including Clinton, held a caucus over lunch on the second floor of the Capitol. There, Graham says he “forcefully” urged his colleagues to read the complete 90-page N.I.E. before casting such a monumental vote.

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[William769]

1. I wonder if this has anything to do with his book about to be published.

Which has already been debunked before it was released.

[Tom Joad]

2. She must have been up reading the latest poor poll ratings for the war all night.

[Bandit]

3. We know one of the six Senators, who are the other five and how did they vote?

Talk about a dereliction of duty. The most important decision a country could ever make , going to war, and 94 Senators never even bothered to read up on it..Yep Nader was so very wrong...

[seafan]

5. Graham, Rockefeller have said they read the entire report. The other names are still classified.

From NBC's Bob Windrem and Mark Murray
May 25, 2007

A new book's revelation that Hillary Clinton did not read the CIA National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD before voting on war authorization should not be a surprise. Most congressmen and senators didn't. And there is a (classified) list of who did and who didn't because members had to visit a secure room -- called the SCIF -- at the Capitol to view it. Members have to sign the document out. In the case of the NIE on Iraq, there were separate logs for the five-page executive summary and the full 90-page NIE.

According to a former senior US intelligence official, "only a handful" of congressmen and senators actually went to the SCIF and signed out the NIE. Most who did were members of the intelligence and armed services committees. Although the log is classified, several senators have admitted either reading or not reading the report. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, of the Senate Intelligence Committee was one who admitted he read it. Among those who have admitted they didn't were Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, D-FL, and Sen. Harry Reid, D-NV, now Senate majority leader.

The Washington Post also reported this back in 2004: "In the fall of 2002, as Congress debated waging war in Iraq, copies of a 92-page assessment of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction sat in two vaults on Capitol Hill, each protected by armed security guards and available to any member who showed up in person, without staff. But only a few ever did. No more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page National Intelligence Estimate executive summary, according to several congressional aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material."

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Here are the Nays on On the Joint Resolution (H.J.Res. 114 )
A joint resolution to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq.]

October 11, 2002, 12:50 AM


YEAs 77
NAYs 23



NAYs ---23

Akaka (D-HI)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Byrd (D-WV)
Chafee (R-RI)
Conrad (D-ND)
Corzine (D-NJ)
Dayton (D-MN)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feingold (D-WI)
Graham (D-FL)
Inouye (D-HI)
Jeffords (I-VT)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Leahy (D-VT)
Levin (D-MI)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murray (D-WA)
Reed (D-RI)
Sarbanes (D-MD)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Wellstone (D-MN)
Wyden (D-OR)

[leftchick]

4. let us take a look back at 2002 and what Hillary actually said and did ......

she can try and re-write history but it ain't working for her. It is your war all right Hil......

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/her-way-hillary_b_49733.html

<snip>


What's more, "Hillary still had no one on her staff with the security clearances needed to read the NIE." So what, exactly did she base her decision on -- briefings provided by the administration? Gerth and Van Natta sum it up this way: "If she did not bother to read the complete intelligence reports, then she did not do enough homework on the decision that she has called the most important of her life." This is particularly shocking given Hillary's obsession -- well-documented in the book -- with being "always well-prepared." Her Way quotes a senate advisor saying, "In her downtime she inhales information and enjoys it."

Perhaps if she had read the NIE she might not have been so fast to buy into the Bush/Cheney talking point linking Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. But buy into it she did, taking to the Senate floor before the war authorization vote to accuse Saddam of giving "aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members." Gerth and Van Natta note that when it came to making the Iraq-9/11 connection, Hillary even out-hawked Joe Lieberman, who "tempered his words on the Senate floor about the connection by noting that the 'relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime is a subject of intense debate within the intelligence community.'"

In an effort to justify her initial support of the war, Hillary has repeatedly insisted that her vote to authorize Bush to use force was actually a vote for diplomacy, that she didn't really believe we would go to war, and that the president misused that authority by giving short shrift to additional diplomatic methods. The authors turn a fan on this smokescreen and show that this claim is contradicted by Hillary's own voting record, pointing out that right before she cast her yes vote on the use of force, she voted against an amendment put forth by Carl Levin that would have required the president to actively pursue diplomacy before going to war. According to Her Way, if Hillary had voted yes on Levin's amendment, "she subsequently could have far more easily argued that she had worked toward a multilateral diplomatic approach. Instead of voting for Bush to pursue more diplomacy, she voted to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq." What's your spin on that one, Howard Wolfson?

[karynnj]

6. Wow - he gives her no breaks here

The history on what she has said on Iraq seems to agree with other written, but what was the point of the references to chewing gum at the meeting. I have never seen any one chew gum at any professional meetings I have gone to - but between the gum and the adjectives used - you don't get the feeling that she is a nice person to be around. That may be true - but there is nothing to back that up - just the adjectives used.

[seafan]

7. More from the article:

More:

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In the early morning hours of Oct. 11, 2002, the Senate voted, 77 to 23, to authorize the Bush administration’s war against Iraq. The result was shaped in part by the coming midterm elections. Some of the senators up for re-election did not want to appear weak on an issue that the administration had skillfully tied to America’s “war on terror.” Clinton, having been elected two years earlier, had no such immediate worries. Even so, she positioned herself carefully.

For all the scrutiny of Clinton’s vote, an important moment has been lost. It came several hours earlier, on Oct. 10, 2002, the same day Clinton spoke about why she would support the Iraq-war authorization. In her remarks on the Senate floor, she stressed the need for diplomacy with Iraq on the part of the Bush administration and insisted she wasn’t voting for “any new doctrine of pre-emption, or for unilateralism.” Yet just a few hours after her speech, Clinton voted against an amendment to the war resolution that would have required the diplomatic emphasis that Clinton had gone on record as supporting — and that she now says she had favored all along.

The long-overlooked vote was on an amendment introduced by Carl Levin and several other Senate Democrats who hoped to rein in President Bush by requiring a two-step process before Congress would actually authorize the use of force. Senators knew full well the wide latitude that they were handing to Bush, which is why some tried to put the brakes on the march to war. The amendment called, first, for the U.N. to pass a new resolution explicitly approving the use of force against Iraq. It also required the president to return to Congress if his U.N. efforts failed and, in Senator Levin’s words, “urge us to authorize a going-it-alone, unilateral resolution.” That resolution would allow the president to wage war as a last option.

Clinton has never publicly explained her vote against the Levin amendment or said why she stayed on the sidelines as 11 other senators debated it for 95 minutes that day. In the end, she joined the significant majority of 75 senators who voted against Levin’s proposal. (A similar measure in the House also lost, though it gained the backing of 155 members.) The 75 senators were largely those who voted later that night in favor of the war authorization. Only four senators — Feinstein, Rockefeller, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa and Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin — voted yes on Levin’s resolution and then voted yes on Bush’s war authorization. If Clinton had done that, she subsequently could have far more persuasively argued, perhaps, that she had supported a multilateral diplomatic approach.

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