WH opposes move to declassify Senate report on Iraq's WMDs

[BrainGlutton]

Story here.

The White House is resisting a move by both Republicans and Democrats to fully declassify a Senate report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Republicans say the public disclosure would help show that the CIA made honest mistakes in its 2002 assessment that Iraq owned stockpiles of WMDs, when in fact it no longer did.

But the White House believes the declassification would trigger another round of negative news media coverage and Democratic-led congressional hearings, said a Senate Republican, who asked to remain anonymous because of ongoing private discussions.

:rolleyes: Anyone care to defend that position on actual public-policy grounds?

[mlees]

Wait. A Senate report?

Shouldn’t we focus on an intelligence report from the CIA to either the President or the Senate? (Presumadly the President made his go/no-go decision based on the CIA report… maybe I am mis-remembering.)

Is this Senate report supposed to refute claims made by the President?

Is the Senate report based on CIA info that the President ignored?

Would the Senate report possibly show that folks can look at the same data and possibly come to different conclusions? (This last would be the only way I can think of to try to explain the White House’s opposition, as stated in the OP.)

(I have no idea how to research my questions. :P)

[BrainGlutton]

@mlees

Is this Senate report supposed to refute claims made by the President?

Is the Senate report based on CIA info that the President ignored?

Would the Senate report possibly show that folks can look at the same data and possibly come to different conclusions? (This last would be the only way I can think of to try to explain the White House’s opposition, as stated in the OP.)

(I have no idea how to research my questions. :P)

Who knows? The linked story says:

Last November, incoming Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and the outgoing chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., signed a letter to the board asking for a review of two committee reports.

One report compared the CIA’s pre-war estimate of Iraq’s WMDs with what was actually uncovered by inspectors in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. The other focused on how the intelligence community used intelligence provided by the Iraqi National Congress, a dissident group in opposition to Saddam Hussein.

Both reports contained blacked-out passages on information the Bush administration declined to declassify.

It also has chilling news about the nine-member Public Interest Declassification Board, which is deciding whether to declassify the report in question:

Under the 2000 law establishing the board, it cannot initiate a review. The president must authorize one. Two pending Senate bills would give the panel the power to recommend declassification on its own, but the White House opposes the legislation on grounds the executive branch should solely control such decisions.

The board is encountering other problems. Congress created it to tackle what some lawmakers consider an over-classification of executive branch documents. But to date, the panel has not made one recommendation on declassification, said a Jan. 19 letter from its chairman, Britt Snider, a former CIA inspector general.

The White House also has failed to fill two vacancies, and the board must compete with The National Archives for funding.

“This puts us at a significant disadvantage as we seek to discharge our responsibilities,” Snider said.

What’s more, the board goes out of existence next year unless Congress reauthorizes it. A board set up to combat excessive secrecy might go extinct without ever declassifying a single executive branch document.

Unless Congress grows a spine.

[Mosier]

@BrainGlutton

Unless Congress grows a spine.

Slight hijack, but I think Congress’ spine will get stronger the closer it gets to election time. Revealing a bunch of declassified information will almost certainly hurt the republicans in the short term, but we’d all forget about it after another year of war. In short, my bet is the democrats are biding their time to drop the WMD report declassification bomb.

[Ravenman]

@mlees

Wait. A Senate report?

Shouldn’t we focus on an intelligence report from the CIA to either the President or the Senate? (Presumadly the President made his go/no-go decision based on the CIA report… maybe I am mis-remembering.)

I believe the report being referenced is this one, which was kind of like a post mordem of why the intelligence agencies were so wrong about WMD in Iraq.

A great deal of the report has already been declassified, but big sections are blacked out. See for example around pages 200 to 205 (in section 5 of the PDFs linked above).

I find it very interesting that Senate Republicans aren’t on the same page as the White House on this. I guess they’re looking at the 2008 elections, too, and see it isn’t worth supporting a lame duck.

[elucidator]

Hell, we already know all this, or at least most of us do.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19375611/site/newsweek/

41% of us believe that Saddam was "directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001? "! Staggering!

Scott Ritter told us the truth about WMD from the scene. His reward? Where the fuck is his Medal of Freedom? His enemies began circulating rumors about charges of child molestation, for Christ’s sake!

The truth is already out there, they lied to us. But if it takes something like this to underscore that truth, hell, bring it on! No such thing as too much truth.