WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — President Bush will establish a bipartisan commission in the next few days to examine a broad overhaul of American intelligence operations, using the case of what went wrong in their assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as part of a look at the difficulties in penetrating secretive regimes and stateless groups that target the United States, senior administration officials said today.
Mr. Bush will issue an executive order establishing the group in coming days, but it will not report back until after the November elections and may take a year and a half or more to reach its conclusions, officials said.
(ed. surprise, surpise)
The president's decision came after a week of escalating pressure on the White House from both Democrats and many ranking Republicans to deal with what the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee has called "egregious" misjudgments of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear programs prior to the United States-led an invasion in March. But by giving the commission a far broader mandate than simply determining what went wrong in the Iraq assessments, Mr. Bush hopes to avoid simply identifying failures by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies. Such finger-pointing runs the risk of alienating the agency and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet.
<snip>
White House officials said the president was still finalizing a list of who would serve on the commission, though Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said they were talking to "very distinguished statesmen and women, who have served their country and who have been users of intelligence, or served in a gathering capacity."
<snip>
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/international/middleeast/01CND-INTE.html
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