The PDBs. The WaPo reports on one stockpile of pre-war Iraq intelligence product the White House had and the Congress did not: that which was in the President's Daily Brief for a few years. Democratic lawmakers are trying to get relevant parts for review by the Senate Select Intelligence committee:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) worked yesterday to attach to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill an amendment that would require portions of Presidential Daily Briefs (PDBs) from Jan. 20, 2000, to March 19, 2003, that referred to Iraq to be submitted to the appropriate congressional committees by the CIA Director Porter J. Goss.

In the House, Democrats on the intelligence committee sent a letter to Stephen J. Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, citing the PDB and other intelligence to argue that it was "highly misleading" to claim that the White House and Congress had equal access to prewar intelligence.

The moves on Capitol Hill were the latest in an increasingly hard-fought dispute between the administration and Democrats over whether the White House exaggerated and misused intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to muster public support for the invasion.

In a Veterans Day speech, Bush said that "a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate . . . had access to the same intelligence" as he did and voted "to support removing Saddam Hussein from power."

Five days later, Vice President Cheney said Democrats who now claim they were misled by the administration are "making a play for political advantage in the middle of a war," and he called the Democratic line of attack "one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city."

Kennedy yesterday described as "plain wrong" the statements by Bush and Cheney that Congress "had the same intelligence about Saddam's development of weapons of mass destruction as they did."...

The proof is in the pudding. I can't imagine why the White House will want to do anything but expedite Kennedy's request to prove everybody was seeing the same stuff. And wouldn't a key thing also be what was in the Vice President's daily brief? One wonders if the vice prez was getting his own version? And what about any documentation from the White House Iraq Group? Fitzgerald subpoenaed a bunch of it for a certain time period relevant to the Plame investigation. Why not get the whole archive? After what we've learned from Fitzgerald, it's impossible to have confidence in any SSCI Phase II report which wouldn't examine those three areas, as well as other points in the terms of reference.

Posted by Laura at November 19, 2005 01:08 PM