Is it To Tell the Truth? No, it's I've Got a Secret

So Georgie the B. has named his hand-picked panel to "figure out why" the reality of no banned weapons in Iraq doesn't square with prewar predictions. Or, more exactly, to figure out how to blame someone other than his own team.

The commission is charged with examining intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and related 21st century threats, Bush said. The panel will compare what has been found by the Iraq Survey Group, which is still scouring Iraq for information about Saddam's arms, with information the administration had in hand before U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq in March 2003.

It also will review U.S. intelligence on weapons programs in countries such as North Korea and Iran, Bush said. In addition, the panel is charged with reviewing spy work on Libya before leader Moammar Gadhafi committed that nation to rid itself of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and on Afghanistan before the Taliban rulers were ousted.

Notice two things here:

First, what the panel will cover. It's mandate goes far beyond the actual question of Iraq and is in fact so broad that it almost inevitably will be a once-over-lightly treatment in which any possible answers about Iraq will get submerged in a sea of minutiae. Which, I suspect, is the idea.

Second, what it won't cover. There is no mention here of decision-making, that is, the panel will not consider how the intelligence was used (read distorted) by the White House. Significantly, there is also no mention of the Office of Special Plans, an intelligence network established for the White House by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the specific purpose of second-guessing the CIA's supposedly "too soft" interpretation of intelligence about Iraq. The group, packed with the usual old-line rightwing nutcases, notoriously cherry-picked intelligence to make the "evidence" fit the predetermined conclusion of justifying the invasion of Iraq. Consideration of its role will not be part of the panel's work - even though it clearly relates to the supposed central issue of the reliability of intelligence.

Okay, folks, got your buckets? Got your brushes? Let's get to work on that fence!

Footnote: In looking at the names of the panelists, one jumped out at me: Co-chair Laurence Silberman. This "retired federal judge" defines rightwing ideologue. I first became aware of him as a figure in the so-called "October Surprise." That was the name for the fear in the 1980 Reagan campaign that President Jimmy Carter would pull off an "October surprise" and free the American hostages then being held by Iran, thus saving his presidency. To counter that, a fair amount of evidence suggests, the Reagan crowd, lead by William Casey, struck an awesomely loathsome deal with Iran under which the Iranians would refuse to release the hostages until after the election in exchange for promises of future arms deliveries from the US. This is from a personal letter I wrote August 25, 1988:

Two things were known to be true in this regard: One, in October 1980 Richard Allen, a top Reagan campaign official, Laurence Silberman, his aide, [emphasis added] and Robert McFarlane, then on the staff of Sen. John Tower, met with emissaries from Iran. And two, Iran did offer an arms-for-hostages deal to representatives of John Anderson's campaign at about the same time. [Anderson ran for president as an independent in 1980; the contact was confirmed by three of his senior aides in September, 1987].

The intriguing item is that after months of speculation, Silberman acknowledged [in the spring of 1988] that an arms-hostages swap was in fact proposed by the Iranians at that meeting. He denies the deal was done, but 1)the meeting was kept secret (Anderson's people reported the contact to the State Department [as required by law]), 2)the hostages weren't released until immediately after Reagan's inauguration, and 3)in 1981, Secretary of State Alexander Haig gave Israel permission to ship over $15 million in American-supplied arms to Iran. If it smells like a duck....

A footnote to that is that Silberman is now Federal District Court Judge Silberman and it was he who earlier this year (temporarily) struck down the law providing for a federal special prosecutor. One wonders if Silberman was a truly disinterested party.

So let's just say I'm not getting my hopes up. Orcinus has more.