But Do They Get the Drafts?

by emptywheel

Walter Pincus tells us the "Sissy Six" are making progress. The six Senators tasked with planning Phase II of the investigation on pre-war intelligence are close to agreement on the scope and plan for the investigation.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday worked out a tentative arrangement for pursuing its inquiry into how the Bush administration publicly portrayed the intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, with Democrats saying they expected some officials to be called to testify before the review is completed.

(No word on whether or not the mouthy Lott had a key role in forging this compromise.)

There are extensive quotes from DiFi explaining that they're going to look into the intelligence that went into the SOTU and Powell's UN Speech.

One example of the work ahead, Feinstein said, would be analyzing President Bush's statement in his 2003 State of the Union address saying the British government had learned that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa.

"We are not looking to place blame," Feinstein said, "but if the president said something like the 16 words on uranium, somebody put them in there, and we want to know what [intelligence] there was before" the speechwriter. She suggested that Robert Joseph, then the National Security Council staff member supervising preparation of the Iraq weapons material in the speech and now undersecretary of state for arms control, might be the type of witness called to testify.

As another example of what she thought should be covered, Feinstein pointed to intelligence covered in then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the U.N. Security Council. He mentioned reports of several Iraqi programs -- later proved incorrect -- including allegations that Iraq had mobile factories for making biological agents, which came from a source known as "Curveball" who had been flagged by a CIA station chief as unreliable. "There was discrediting information in the mill at the time, and we want to find what went to Powell," Feinstein said.

But what DiFi doesn't say is whether they'll get into the drafts of those documents. Her office says only,

At a news conference last week, the Democratic members said they were interested in getting the material that Libby contributed.  At this time, unfortunately, I can't tell you whether this material will be turned over.

There's some debate about whether there are early drafts of the SOTU that named Niger and a quantity of yellowcake. Alan Foley said there were in his testimony before the Senate Committee on Intelligence. And Condi mentioned such early drafts in a press conference the week before the Plame leak. But the SSCI never got to see those early drafts. Instead, they had to take Robert Joseph's word that early drafts didn't include references to Niger.

There's less debate whether there were early drafts of Powell's speech. Indeed, Murray Waas not only tells us there were early drafts, but he tells us why the SSCI didn't receive those drafts: Scooter Libby, with the assistance of David Addington, refused to turn them over, against the counsel of the White House.

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.

Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.

The drafts of these documents, more than the finished speeches, will reveal how the Bush Administration (save Powell) was twisting intelligence. Indeed, they'll delineate precisely what the Bush Administration wanted to claim--and what the CIA and Powell's staff removed during the vetting process. By looking at the drafts, then, we'll know precisely how the Administration--as opposed to the CIA--politicized intelligence.

Getting the White House to turn over documents was one of the issues that turned the first phase of the probe into such a nasty issue in the first place. I have no great hope the White House is going to be any more forthcoming now than they were two years ago (although, Scooter Libby isn't around to obstruct the Senate's investigation anymore). But if the committee can't get the drafts of these speeches, they're only skimming the surface. The real evidence of how the White House politicized intelligence is bound to be in those early drafts. Which is why we're probably never going to learn about them.

Comments

[mamayaga]

Mightn't Powell and Wilkerson have kept copies? And they're not likely to be classified, since they were drafts of public speeches.

[silver]

I cought a story on Fox news a few days ago about Howard Dean Refusing to turn over documents created durring his govenorship. A court had upheld his right to keep these documents confidential for 9 years. No oped or pundits, just short and sweet.

A somethings struck me as being odd. I didn't see the story on other networks. My intuition told me that this story was "Hey, keeping documents secreet is common day activity, look everyones doing it, and it's perfectly okay".
My guess is that those early drafts have long been reconstituted at the papermill. I hope sloppy house cleaning or some ass saving individual will be able to produce these goods (or bads).

[emptywheel]

mamayaga

I think Wilkerson said he had the evidence but had to turn it all in when he retired. Assume the same is true for Powell.

As far as the SOTU drafts. They may have been deep-sixed. But I assume they'd have to clean off the hard drives, as well. What I'm most interested in is that they disappeared from the WINPAC files (if they were there). Reading the Bolton testimony, it's clear that Bolton's office, at least, didn't follow regulations on Secure Classified Information. They had documents floating in and out of the office, when they should have all been logged and under lock and key. I wonder if WINPAC is the same.

[John Lopresti]

This was the speech Powell stammered through, Libby, unusually, at his side at the UN; Libby probably wrote the bulk of the lengthy draft there in the notebook at Powell's elbow in the Security Council, much of which Powell did not include in his speech. If anyone has the audio, you can tell when he lapses from technical jargon into vernacular as he skips paragraphs reading ahead until he is ready to resume reading from the speech document. It was noticeable to this rhetorician, as Powell's lexicon is distinctly different from the usual fare in diplomatic circles. There was the Cincinnati precursor speech as well. DiFi admires the military a lot. Perhaps she is the key person who is going to pry the backgrounders from Rummy's safeguard; surely he helped aggregate the list.

[silver]

E.W.
I just checked out webarchive.org
They archive old web pages nolonger posted. I typed in whitehouse.gov
Then selected feb 2 2003. Unfortunately feb 18th link is not functioning. Maybe some treasures can be found hidden with in their own junk pile. One picture missing in part of the "Behind the Scenes" photo essay is interestingly revealing. When you hover the mouse over the missing picture the text appears "Sketching notes in the margin of speech drafts, President Bush rewrites portions of the adress in the Oval Office Jan. 23,2003."

I imagine there may be some gems in these pages that could proove to damaging.

[Sibelius]

Sure would be nice if Rockefeller grew a spine and went after the necessary information. The prospects of this seem low, sadly, though a good firm shove from the Democrat base might stimulate something.

Regarding the "twisting" of old data, it's probably still also smart to be suspicious of new data -- including yesterday's bombings in Amman, Jordan.

-It turns out that the head of the Palestinian intelligence services, Bashir Nafeh, was killed by one of the bombs.

-It turns out that Haaretz reported last night that all Israelis were evacuated from one of the hotels just prior to the bombings -- and that Haaretz has issued a sudden reversal of that report today. Meanwhile, the BBC reports that no Israelis perished in the attacks.(BTW -- Remind anyone of Netanyahu's brush with the London bombings? Same pattern exactly.)

-It turns out that Al Qaeda and Zawahiri are supposed to be taking credit for the blasts, according to some posting on an Internet site. (Fresh convenient evidence of the need for the War on Terror, for the US to remake the map of the Middle East...)

Summary: A major Palestinian leader is killed, no Israelis are in the hotels, and the all-purpose ever-mysterious boogeyman Zawahiri is blamed.

What an impressive string of conveniences. How long will the world continue to swallow such propaganda? Alas, the pattern stays the same.

Links on this:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,17199844-23109,00.html
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/643661.html
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/11/10/92640/472

[KM]

"The drafts of these documents, more than the finished speeches, will reveal how the Bush Administration (save Powell) was twisting intelligence. Indeed, they'll delineate precisely what the Bush Administration wanted to claim--and what the CIA and Powell's staff removed during the vetting process. By looking at the drafts, then, we'll know precisely how the Administration--as opposed to the CIA--politicized intelligence."

One would think, EW ... and yet, and yet. Lord Hutton had the drafts and the e-mails, after all.

I guess it depends on who you mean by "we".

As for the broader public discourse, Mark Danner frames the problem nicely, in commenting on Michael Kinsley's dismissal of the "Downing Street Memos" as failing to constitute a "smoking gun":

"Part of this comes down to the question of what, in our current political and journalistic world, constitutes a 'fact'.... One might ask what would convince this writer [Kinsley], and many others, of the truth of what, apparently, they already know, and accept, and acknowledge that they know and accept. What could be said to establish 'truth'—to 'prove it'? Perhaps a true congressional investigation of the way the administration used intelligence before the war.... Still, Kinsley's column, and the cynical and impotent attitude it represents, suggests that such an investigation, if it occurred, might still not be adequate to make a publicly acceptable fact out of what everyone now knows and accepts. The column bears the perfect headline 'No Smoking Gun', which suggests that failing the discovery of a tape recording in which President Bush is quoted explicitly ordering then Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet that he should 'fix the intelligence and facts around the policy', many will never regard the case as proved...."

[John Lopresti]

In retrospect, there is likely to be an even longer and diverse paper trail EW. I believe it is reported the Iraq plan was a facile kickstart because tomes of unused initiatives had gathered dust on the shelf since the abrupt terminus of the first forray during Bush's father's presidency. Even with the on the ground inspections and the very hazardous no overflight zone clamped on airspace for years after that first conflict's end, I would assess the dossier was in a dynamically informed state, and so little had changed in Iraq and the region in that brief decade that the warplanbook was sufficiently viable a strategy that Bush-2 and his principals were quite confident in the vitality [oxymoron] of the plan and, thereby, were emboldened to slight the NIE process, cleaving it into half-length compared to the typical development timeline three months to arrive at a NIE. A thorough archive datagathering with respect to these early plans and the threads of their nurturing over that decade would be a rewarding context in which to depict the abbreviated stacatto of policy decisions which turned the diplomatic world topsy turvy and impelled Congress into rubberstamping the entire construct as mature, well devised, and emotionally justified or perhaps only justifiable in the debater's syntax instead of thoroughly reviewed by Congress.

I caught in an offhand remark from Sen Leahy in the Roberts hearing an interesting sensibility that Rudman's plaintive remains alive in the Senate. Roberts gave a cookie cutter reply. Leahy had mused about a President's authority to send troops, but asked Roberts whether Congress has authority to end the war. The nominee had the standard response about the legislature holding the power of the purse. This Iraq war is overt. Rudman had to deal with covert war.