The "we saw the same intel" argument put to rest

From the War Room:

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When Democrats had George W. Bush on the defensive about prewar intelligence last month, the White House kept insisting that Congress saw the "same intelligence" the president saw and made the decision to go to war, too.

We said that it wasn't true then, and now a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service seems to provide confirmation. At the request of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the CRS compared the intelligence that is available to the White House with that which is available to members of Congress. The conclusion: There's really no comparison.

“The president and a small number of presidentially designated Cabinet-level officials, including the vice president -- in contrast to members of Congress -- have access to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information, including information regarding intelligence sources and methods," the CRS says in a report distributed by Feinstein's office. Unlike members of Congress, the report says, the president and those who work for him "have the authority to more extensively task the intelligence community, and its extensive cadre of analysts, for follow-up information. As a result, the president and his most senior advisors arguably are better positioned to assess the quality of the community’s intelligence more accurately than is Congress."

Generally speaking, the report says, the executive branch withholds from Congress four types of intelligence: the identities of intelligence sources; the methods used to collect and analyze intelligence; "raw" or "lightly" evaluated intelligence; and "certain written intelligence products tailored to the specific needs of the president and other high-level executive branch policymakers," including the President's Daily Briefing.

In releasing the report, Feinstein said that it puts the lie to the administration's "we all saw the same intelligence" argument and underscores the need for completion of the second phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation. "When the Senate voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq in 2002, it was based on a more limited scope of prewar intelligence than was available to the administration," Feinstein said. "I believe that Congress and the American people deserve to know what precisely was known by the president and the administration before the use of force in Iraq. If the Senate Intelligence Committee is to produce a credible and useful report for its ongoing 'Phase II' investigation, it must have access to all the same intelligence as the administration that it was previously denied, particularly the PDBs."

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[PoBoy321]

link?

Thats too long. Basically, anyone who says the congress people saw the same intel as the president and vice prez is telling a lie. Bush said it twice the other day, what does that make him?

http://feinstein.senate.gov/crs-intel.htm

Congressional Access to Intelligence Information Not Routinely Provided in Four Areas

The executive branch generally does not routinely share with Congress four general types of intelligence information:


the identities of intelligence sources;

the "methods" employed by the Intelligence Community in collecting and analyzing intelligence;

"raw" intelligence, which can be unevaluated or "lightly" evaluated intelligence, (18) which in the case of human intelligence (19) sometimes is provided by a single source, but which also could consist of intelligence derived from multiple sources when signals (20) and imagery (21) collection methods are employed; and,

Certain written intelligence products tailored to the specific needs of the President and other high-level executive branch policymakers. Included in the last category is the President's Daily Brief (PDB), a written intelligence product which is briefed daily to the President, and which consists of six to eight relatively short articles or briefs covering a broad array of topics. (22) The PDB emphasizes current intelligence (23) and is viewed as highly sensitive, in part, because it can contain intelligence source and operational information. Its dissemination is thus limited to the President and a small number of presidentially-designated senior administration policymakers.

[BCPVP]

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The "we saw the same intel" argument put to rest

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Hardly. In fact, Congress has less of a pass now that we know that raw/lightly developed intelligence is withheld from Congress. They can't hide behind the "we didn't see the real intelligence" excuse. How can you be mislead when you have access to the best intel and still vote for the authority?

[twowords]

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The "we saw the same intel" argument put to rest

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Hardly. In fact, Congress has less of a pass now that we know that raw/lightly developed intelligence is withheld from Congress. They can't hide behind the "we didn't see the real intelligence" excuse. How can you be mislead when you have access to the best intel and still vote for the authority?

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You somehow miss the point. The minor revelation of sorts here is that the admnistration assured the packaging of contradictory or relatively uncertain raw intelliegence to appear much more ceratin in the report given to Congress.

I blamed many of our representatives for reading just the five pages summery and not investigating enough through the intelligence commitees. A subtle admnistration sleight of hand appears present, but really its the inherent aspects of a buearocracy which sort of ensured a biased intelligence picture given administration directive. The administration policy was "find Iraq evidence related to 9/11" and not "lets find out if any states supported 9/11." Of course after that directive you try to find evidence to please your bosses and you lose the balanced or accurate picture.

Pure ideology tends to lead to bad policy. And like an old econometrics professor once said: "a data set is like a human being: if your torture it enough, it will tell you what you want to know."

Well, that changes everything. [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

[MMMMMM]

My understanding is that Congress can request the "raw" intelligence if they so desire. Of course, that would take more effort on their parts, as would poring over the raw intelligence for themselves, so they generally don't do it. Of course I could be wrong, but that is my understanding.

So the use of the term "withheld" does not mean "are totally prevented access to." Rather, it means that they are given summary-like intelligence findings, and they still have the option of requesting more detail, including the same raw intelligence the CIA has. Generally however they simply don't request that.

[adios]

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I blamed many of our representatives for reading just the five pages summery and not investigating enough through the intelligence commitees.

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Right. Those Democrats is Congress that imply they're not accountable for their actions regarding the vote on the resolution more or less is disgraceful IMO. Gephardt during his failed campaign for president stated that he and members of Congress were certainly accountable for their vote.

Um, they only saw the intel that the White House chose to share with them.

[BCPVP]

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Um, they only saw the intel that the White House chose to share with them.

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I'll admit that I don't know exactly how the process works, but from the OP's article, that sounds partially misleading. There are types of intel that the executive branch can "choose" not to share. But the rest, it sounds like Congress has access to so the excuse that they were mislead is still pretty horseshit, it seems.