http://mediamatters.org/items/200511040008Hardball panel mischaracterized Democratic efforts to complete intel probe as "disingenuous," "using crocodile tears"
November 1 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell, Newsweek chief political correspondent Howard Fineman, and host Chris Matthews baselessly assigned motives to both the Democrats' support of the Iraq war in October 2002 and their recent push to complete "phase two" of the Senate Intelligence Committee's probe into the prewar intelligence on Iraq. The panel characterized Democrats' current efforts to fully examine the Bush administration's handling of the intelligence as "disingenuous," "using crocodile tears," and "trying to climb down off the war." Their rationale for this criticism? That Democrats who originally voted to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq did so out of "political fear" and failed to scrutinize the prewar intelligence at that juncture because "they didn't want to vote against a war at time when we had been hit by 9-11." As Matthews asserted, "{T}hey really didn't want the whole truth they're saying they're wanting now."
Democrats have a response to counter the accusation that they "didn't want to look under that rock" in late 2002 and they are only pursuing the "whole truth" now. But Mitchell, Fineman, and Matthews apparently felt no need to present it. Democratic members of Congress note that the judgments provided to Congress on the Iraqi threat prior to the vote were later found to have been false or exaggerated. There were also discrepancies -- about which Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) claimed that Democrats were prevented from notifying the public at the time -- between the administration's public statements and the underlying intelligence, and they say the American people deserve to know whether the administration deliberately distorted or falsified intelligence to justify its case for war. The Democrats' stated purpose in forcing the Senate into closed session was to obtain a vow that the Senate Intelligence Committee would investigate this, as the committee's chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), had previously promised. The Hardball panel -- consisting of people who purport to be journalists -- apparently did not think that the Democrats' actual argument warranted articulation, and instead opted simply to label their current efforts "disingenuous."
The Senate Intelligence Committee, in its "phase one" report examining the intelligence community's assessments on Iraq, determined that the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided to Congress in October 2002 misled policymakers. The following are the first two conclusions in the 2004 report:
Conclusion 1. Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting. A series of failures, particularly in the analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence.
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