Recall just last week Bush appointed a commission to investigate the "faulty" US Intell and at the same time he explicitly directed this commission not to look into how the "White House" used that intel.
That issue was strickly off limits!
And to ensure this would happen, Bush hand picked the former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman - you remember him. He was the Judge at the center of the Iran-Contra trial who acquited Oliver North and the special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh was seriously thinking of filing papers for judicial misconduct...
The Iran-Contra investigation was being blocked by the Bush administration, which refused to permit classified CIA documents to be turned over to North and other defendants, citing "national security." This was a transparent maneuver to hamstring the prosecution, in which the White House encouraged North, Poindexter & Co. to seek the documents and then instructed the CIA to refuse them, in order to create an appealable issue.
As Walsh pointed out later, in his book on the Iran-Contra coverup, the judiciary itself played a key political role. He wrote: "a powerful band of Republican appointees waited like the strategic reserves of an embattled army. The final evaluation of the immunity Congress had granted Oliver North and John Poindexter would be the work of yet another political force--a force cloaked in the black robes of those dedicated to defining and preserving the rule of law. Although the judiciary is theroretically a neutral arm of government and judges are expected to eschew partisan poltics, the underlying political nature of all government institutions was evident when a three-judge panel from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reviewed Oliver North's conviction in 1990."
it doesn't stop there - wait there's more.
Silberman was also involved in the Regan's Iran Hostage negotiations to keep American's Prisoners until the Carter Administration was officialy out of office. He was dubbed the Reagan-Bush campaign's "ambassador to Iran" for his behind-the-scenes contacts with the Khomeini regime
If you want an issue white washed then Silberman is your man.
Not this time!
Enter stage left - the SIC.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has agreed to expand its review of intelligence on Iraq to
examine whether the Bush administration accurately described the information it had on Saddam Hussein's weapons. The committee will examine "whether public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq by U.S. government officials (between the 1991 Gulf War and the Iraq War) were substantiated by intelligence information," committee leaders said in a statement Thursday night.
The panel is nearing completion of a report expected to be extremely critical of the intelligence agencies' collection and analysis of prewar intelligence. Since the inquiry began in June, Democrats have insisted that the commission also examine whether the administration distorted intelligence to help build the case for war. Republicans have refused and both sides have accused the other of using the traditionally bipartisan committee for political purposes.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/02/13/sprj.nirq.intelligence.ap/index.html
