[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 20]
[Senate]
[Pages 27061-27062]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       IRAQ PRE-WAR INTELLIGENCE

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, yesterday Vice President Cheney said 
elected officials had access to the intelligence and were free to draw 
their own conclusions. They arrived at the same judgment about Iraq's 
capabilities and intentions made by this administration and by the 
previous administration. What world is the Vice President living in? No 
one seriously believes what the Vice President is saying. Once again, 
he is deliberately deceiving the American people. It is a calculated, 
partisan, political ploy.
  President Bush and the Vice President have begun a new campaign of 
distortion and manipulation because the polls show that Americans have 
lost trust in the President and believe he manipulated intelligence 
before the war. The President and Vice President have abandoned any 
pretense of leading this country and have gone back on to the campaign 
trail.
  But the country won't have it this time. Not only can the President 
and Vice President not find weapons of mass destruction, they cannot 
find the truth either. The administration broke the essential bond of 
trust that has to exist between the White House and the American 
people. They have to be able to trust that we will be told the truth, 
especially on the important issues of war and peace.
  The Congress did not have access to the intelligence the President 
and the Vice President had. It is plain wrong. The administration's 
drumbeat for war began in the summer of 2002, but it did not provide an 
intelligence estimate--the collective wisdom of the intelligence 
community--to back up its claims about al-Qaida and nuclear weapons and 
the immediate threats until Democrats on the Intelligence Committee 
demanded it.
  Even then, the administration did not provide the intelligence 
estimate until October 1, 2002--2 days before the debate began on the 
resolution authorizing war. The vote on the resolution occurred 1 week 
later, on October 11.
  Beyond the NIE, the suggestion that the Members of Congress have 
access to the same classified material as the President is 
preposterous. The President receives a Presidential daily brief and a 
briefing every morning with top intelligence officials. The White House 
has access to memos with intelligence information that the Congress 
never sees. Even when we ask for this information, they do not provide 
it.
  It is abundantly clear that the administration is engaged in nothing 
more than a devious attempt to obscure the facts and take the focus off 
the real reason we went to war in Iraq. No matter what the Vice 
President says, 150,000 American troops are bogged down in a quagmire 
in Iraq because the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted 
the intelligence to justify a war America never should have fought. 
They misled us on al-Qaida. They misled us on aluminum tubes, materials 
from Africa, and nuclear weapons.
  What was said before by the administration does matter. The 
President's words matter, and so do the Vice President's, and so do the 
Secretary of State's, and so do the Secretary of Defense's, and the 
other high officials in the administration, and they did not square 
with the facts.
  The Intelligence Committee agreed to investigate the clear 
discrepancies, and it is important they get to the bottom of this and 
find out how and why this President took America to war in Iraq. 
Americans are dying. Already more than 2,000 have been killed, and more 
than 15,000 have been wounded.
  The American people deserve the truth. It is time for the President 
to stop passing the buck and for him to be held accountable. It is time 
for a change in this country. Something has to give. A tarnished White 
House and damaged Presidency is pulling America backwards.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I spend most of my time with the work of 
the Judiciary Committee and the work of the Finance Committee. I do not 
get into intelligence and Armed Services issues very often. But I 
listened to Senator Kennedy's criticism of President Bush and Vice 
President Cheney that they deceived the American people.
  I saw some things on television last night of which Senator Kennedy 
ought to be reminded. If he watched television last night, he might 
have a little different view.
  I heard him say that President Bush maybe had more information than 
Congress had, and so it was wrong for the President today to say that 
Congress is rewriting history in any way because he maybe had more 
information than we had. I believe that is what Senator Kennedy said.
  I do not know for sure if the President has more information than we 
have because when I go upstairs to S-407, to our secure briefing room, 
I am assuming I am getting the same information as the President is 
getting. Perhaps not as often, but getting the same information. So I 
think it is ludicrous to say that Members of the Senate cannot be up to 
speed on what the threats are to our Nation. But, for sure, if he had 
watched television last night, he would have heard a speech by 
President Clinton in 1998. The speech was on the threat of Saddam 
Hussein to our country at that time. Surely, Senator Kennedy cannot 
deny that President Clinton had exactly the same information President 
Bush would have had from our intelligence community. I very clearly 
heard President Clinton, when he was President, speak of the terrible 
threat that Saddam Hussein was to the world and to America, and that he 
was going down a road to do something about it.
  Now, obviously, that did not happen. But we did pass a resolution 
called the Iraqi Liberation Act, where Congress, in a unanimous vote 
took a position at that period of time that we considered Saddam 
Hussein a threat and that he ought to be removed from office, from the 
leadership of his country.
  If President Clinton, while he was in office, using that 
intelligence, saw Saddam Hussein as a threat, the same way President 
Bush did, I do not see how any Democrat can be on the floor of the 
Senate and say the President of the United States is deceiving the 
American people.
  Also, last night I happened to hear a 2- or 3-minute speech by 
Senator Clinton, made in 2002, how horrible Saddam Hussein was and how 
he was somebody to fear and a threat and the inclination of doing 
something about it.
  It is intellectually dishonest for any Democrat to come to the floor 
and accuse our President of misleading the American people. They ought 
to be ashamed of themselves. Have they no shame?
  I have something I want to refer to because we have had people 
outside the Congress, outside the administration, look at some of these 
very issues. We had the Robb-Silberman commission report. Senator Robb 
is a former Democratic Member of this body. Judge Silberman is a 
Republican, served on the DC Circuit. They gave a report about 
Presidential daily briefings versus what is in the National 
Intelligence Estimate. There is no significant difference between the 
two reports, the Presidential daily briefing and the National 
Intelligence Estimate. Quoting from the report:

       It was not that the intelligence was markedly different. 
     Rather, it was that the PDBs and the SEIBs, with their 
     attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition, left 
     an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact 
     there were very few sources. And in other instances, 
     intelligence suggesting the existence of weapons programs was 
     conveyed to senior policymakers, but later information 
     casting doubt upon the validity of that intelligence was not.

  That is shortcomings of our intelligence community, the same 
shortcomings that President Clinton probably experienced during his 
time in office, when he was making estimates of

[[Page 27062]]

the threat of Saddam Hussein, the same way that President Bush was 
making those estimates.
  The Robb-Silberman commission found Presidential daily briefings to 
contain similar intelligence in ``more alarmist'' and ``less nuanced'' 
language. Continuing to quote:

       As problematic as the October 2002 [National Intelligence 
     Estimate] was, it was not the Community's biggest analytic 
     failure on Iraq. Even more misleading was the river of 
     intelligence that flowed from the CIA to top policymakers 
     over long periods of time--in the President's Daily Brief and 
     in its more widely distributed companion, the Senior 
     Executive Intelligence Brief. These daily reports were, if 
     anything, more alarmist and less nuanced than the [National 
     Intelligence Estimate].

  That is what one former Democratic Senator and a Republican judge, 
appointed to a commission to look into this, have reported. When you 
take all of these things into consideration, plus the quotes of Senator 
Clinton that I referred to in the year 2002 that I saw on television 
last night, or the statements by President Clinton in 1998 when he was 
President that I saw on television last night, it seems to me it is 
absolutely wrong and misleading to come up here and say the President 
of the United States and the Vice President were deceiving the American 
people, particularly when Senators can have briefings if they want 
them.

                          ____________________