John Dean: Iraq Commission Won't Be Investigating the Key WMD Issue

[Martin Eden]

John Dean (of Watergate fame) provides an excellent analysis of how the Iraq WMD commission is designed NOT to investigate the issue of how the intelligence was manipulated by the Bush administration:

President Bush's New Iraq Commission Won't Be Investigating the Key WMD Issue: How the Executive Order Fatally Limits Their Agenda
By JOHN W. DEAN
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With a few strokes of his pen, Bush had an Executive Order that he can now use to remove the issue of his administration's distorting Saddam's pre-war WMD intelligence from the 2004 campaign. "The commission is studying the matter," they will say, when asked about the missing WMD in Iraq, and Saddam's ties to al Qeada.

Everyone understands that Bush has removed the issue from the 2004 campaign by not requiring his commission to report until March 31, 2005 -- long after the election. But in fact, he has done much more than this to assure that this commission causes him no political problems. One need only look at the president's statement announcing the commission to understand that Bush is not playing it straight.
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It should be noted that this definition appears to exclude the Office of Special Planning (OSP). The OSP once resided in the Defense Department. It has been widely reported as a rogue intelligence group, which operated outside the Intelligence Community and provided the key information relied on by Bush and Cheney. Similarly, it excludes the Office of the Vice President, which is widely believed the source of much of the dubious intelligence. Plainly, the OSP and Cheney's operation should be at the top of the Commission's list of which agencies to investigate. Instead, it seems they have dropped off that list entirely.
<snip>

They have preempted the Congress successfully by appointing a commission with little expertise in intelligence matters that will not report until after the election. They have mandated the commission to do everything but what was being demanded -- namely, that it examine the role of the Bush administration in dealing with the intelligence that was collected, then exaggerated and manipulated.
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Read more:
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20040213.html

[Martin Eden]

1. Kick

I think Dean's analysis is worth a look, for those who might have missed it.