Fighting Words, Revisited

Back in 2004, when the Senate intelligence committee began investigating whether public statements by U.S. officials about Saddam Hussein's pre-invasion Iraq were "substantiated" by existing intel, Republicans controlled Congress and the committee's inquiry was aimed at figures on both sides of the aisle. The idea was to examine the fighting words of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney as well as prominent Democrats including Al Gore, Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Hillary Clinton. But Democrats, who took over the panel after winning Senate control in 2006, decided that the final report would examine only statements by "policymakers"—in other words, the Bush administration. So in the report, due out this week, no Democratic comments will be parsed. That includes an Oct. 10, 2002, speech by Clinton in which she criticized Saddam's WMD ambitions and accused him of giving "aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members."

According to three intelligence officials familiar with the inquiry, who asked for anonymity when discussing an unpublished report, even committee Democrats are expected to acknowledge that most of the prewar WMD statements were proved inaccurate only after the invasion. The forthcoming report, though, is expected to be more critical about prewar discussion of Saddam's terrorist links. During a Sept. 8, 2002, appearance on "Meet the Press," for instance, Cheney discussed a Czech intelligence report claiming that Muhammad Atta had met an Iraqi spy in Prague a few months before he led the 9/11 attacks. But a declassified July 2002 report by the Defense Intelligence Agency had already debunked that claim, pointing out that there was no "photographic, immigration or other documentary evidence" to support it. NEWSWEEK discovered another recently declassified Pentagon document that reported that Czech officials retracted some of their original claims about Atta's Prague visit when they realized they had "confused him with a Pakistani national with a similar name." A Cheney spokeswoman said that she could not comment on a Senate report that she had not yet seen.

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