START WITH WWII:

Bush to order Iraq intelligence probe (Judy Keen and Bill Nichols, 2/1/2004, USA TODAY)

President Bush, in a major policy shift, will announce this week that he will create an independent panel to probe why U.S. intelligence agencies were wrong about claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a high-ranking White House official said Sunday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, offered few details. He said Bush would create the panel by executive order, select its members and charge it with analyzing apparent intelligence failures during the current administration and its predecessors.

Members would likely be former intelligence analysts, government officials and members of Congress from both parties, the official said. He would not say whether the panel's conclusions would be released before the November election.

The key here will be to not limit the investigation to Iraq but to widen it to the entire disastrous history of the US intelligence services. Too bad Pat Moynihan is dead, because his book, Secrecy, has already done most of the spade work. It shows that Iraq is simply the latest in a long line of uninterrupted intelligence failures.

UPDATE (from mc):
PROBE TO GO BEYOND IRAQ WAR (Joseph Curl, 2/02/04, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

The executive order the president will sign this week will direct the commission to take a "broad look at our intelligence, particularly related to weapons of mass destruction," the official said. "It will look at Iraq, but it will be more broad than that.

"There are outlaw regimes and closed societies that seek to conceal their conduct through deception and denial, and the president believes that it is important for our country to have a bipartisan review, because the global intelligence challenges that we face are new, are more complex and are more difficult," the official said.

The probe will look back ˜ possibly as far as previous administrations ˜ but will also be "forward looking," with an eye toward coming up with solutions for what appear to be major intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war.

MORE:
Kay's say and the CIA (John Leo, 2/02/04, Jewish World Review)

Kay's smooth and convincing testimony at his Senate hearing helps to discredit the theory that neoconservatives in the Bush administration conspired to manipulate intelligence reports. In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Duke professor of political science Peter Feaver writes: "How could even the all-powerful neocons have manipulated the intelligence estimates of the Clinton administration, French intelligence, British intelligence, German intelligence, and all the other `coconspirators' who concurred on the fundamentals of the Bush assessment?" Belief that Saddam had WMD was so universal that one blogger, Calpundit.com, launched a contest of sorts seeking the names of any serious analysts who publicly doubted the actual existence of WMD in Iraq before September of 2002, when the U.N. inspections resumed. The blogger and his readers identified two people who qualified: Russian President Vladimir Putin and former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter. The point here is unmissable. The huge consensus about WMD in Iraq was wrong, and the arrow is pointing toward the intelligence services.

-Bush to Establish Panel to Examine U.S. Intelligence (DAVID E. SANGER, 2/02/04, NY Times)

The commission will not report back until after the November elections. Some former officials who have been approached about taking part say they believe it may take 18 months or more to reach its conclusions.

"It became clear to the president that he couldn't sit there and seem uninterested in the fact that the Iraq intel went off the rails," said one senior official involved in the discussions. "He had to do something, and he chose to enlarge the problem, beyond the Iraq experience."

White House officials said the president was still completing a list of who would serve on the commission, expected to have about nine members. Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said Sunday that they were talking to "very distinguished statesmen and women, who have served their country and who have been users of intelligence, or served in a gathering capacity." Among those who have been consulted, officials say, is Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser under Mr. Bush's father. Mr. Scowcroft, who was a harsh critic of the process by which the current president decided to go to war, is currently the head of a foreign intelligence advisory board and it is unclear if he will play a role in the new commission.

Mr. Bush's effort is intended to put the study into a broader context — the retooling of American intelligence-gathering for a new era of terrorism and nuclear proliferation by rogue scientists and countries that may pass weapons into the hands of groups like Al Qaeda.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 2, 2004 9:43 AM