Citing new report, Dems rip ‘heinous’ prewar rhetoric

By J. Taylor Rushing
Posted: 06/05/08 12:40 PM [ET]

Democrats blasted the Bush administration’s rhetorical road to war in Iraq as “heinous” Thursday, citing a new Senate Intelligence Committee report that said the administration mishandled prewar intelligence.

However, senators stopped short of pressing for criminal charges, and the White House shot back that the report was old news.

A pair of Intelligence Committee reports released earlier Thursday said Bush administration officials gave biased and incomplete assessments of Iraq’s threat to the U.S. and inappropriately tried to implicate Iran as a threat to national security.

Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and fellow Democrats Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said the reports show Bush and others deliberately shaded or ignored facts in favor of rushing the country into war.

“The tragic fact is, on issues of war and peace, which should require the most meticulous and the most precise adherence to the truth, the administration was too often careless with its words, including in some cases making presentations that were not substantiated by the available intelligence — or worse, directly contradicted by the available intelligence,” Rockefeller said. “The administration went well beyond what the intelligence community knew and what it believed.”

Rockefeller said Democrats would not formally prosecute the point against the administration because doing so would automatically shut down relations between the legislative and executive branches.

“It would mean nothing else, whether it’s clean air or FISA, would get done,” he said. “It’s like pressing for impeachment. It’s a grand act with only five or six months to go. It’s a futile act and it’s a wrong act, because we do have business to do. Should it be done in the wide sweep of history? Yes. Should it be done by us, now? No.”

White House press secretary Dana Perino told reporters that the report partially vindicates the administration on some points but otherwise simply rehashes old claims that the administration has already acknowledged.

More Here