Panel Selected to Investigate Iraq Arms Data

Amid mounting questions about the administration’s case for war, President Bush on Friday created a bipartisan commission -- led by a conservative judge and a former Democratic senator -- to investigate problems with the prewar intelligence on Iraq. But he put off a final report from the panel until well after the November presidential election.

Bush said he was “determined to figure out why” the intelligence community’s prewar assessments were so at odds with the postwar reality on the ground; no biological or chemical weapons have been found in Iraq, and there is little evidence backing up administration claims that the country was actively pursuing nuclear weapons.

Bush gave the commission a much broader mandate than had been expected, charging it with assessing the intelligence on weapons programs in Iran, North Korea and Libya.

The administration “is determined to make sure that American intelligence is as accurate as possible for every challenge in the future,” Bush said. “The stakes for our country could not be higher, and our standard of intelligence-gathering and analysis must be equal to that of the challenge.”

Bush gave the commission until March 31, 2005, to complete its work.

The president appointed Laurence Silberman, a retired judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and former Virginia Sen. Charles S. Robb, a Democrat and former Marine who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, to serve as co-chairmen of the panel.

As expected, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was among the seven commissioners named Friday. Others were Lloyd Cutler, the former White House counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton; Richard Levin, the president of Yale, Bush’s alma mater; Adm. William Studeman, a former deputy director of the CIA; and Patricia Wald, a liberal-leaning former judge on the D.C. Court of Appeals.

The selections puzzled many in Washington. Some questioned why the administration picked so many members with seemingly limited experience in intelligence matters or background working in high-level national security positions.

“There are no former Cabinet members, no former senior ambassadors and no former” top military commanders, said Jeffrey Smith, former general counsel at the CIA. “In other words, nobody who has, on a day-to-day basis, made the kind of decisions in foreign policy that the president and his Cabinet must make.”

In establishing the panel, Bush reversed a position he held just weeks ago: that an independent probe of Iraq intelligence was unnecessary.

That stance became politically untenable late last month, after the outgoing chief U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq, David Kay, said the bulk of the prewar intelligence on Iraq was wrong and that he believed Baghdad did not possess stocks of chemical or biological munitions when the U.S. military invaded last year.

Although the appointments were not seen as being stacked politically in favor of the president, Democrats in Congress raised a number of complaints about the way the commission was formed and the mandate it was given.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said the administration should have given Congress a role in creating the commission, as was the case with the panel now investigating intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. The White House avoided that step this time by creating the new commission by executive order.

“We have a commission wholly owned by the executive branch investigating the executive branch,” Pelosi said in a statement, adding that the arrangement “does not inspire confidence in its independence.”

Others said the White House carefully constructed the commission’s mandate to have it look at a wide array of intelligence issues, but not examine the way the administration used its Iraq intelligence to make its case for war.

“The commission is charged with looking at prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq, but apparently not at exaggerations of that intelligence by the Bush administration,” said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

In a speech in Washington on Thursday, Kay said he believed that an independent investigation ought to look at the administration’s use of intelligence.

CIA Director George J. Tenet added to the pressure on the White House when he delivered an impassioned speech Thursday defending the agency, acknowledging problems with its prewar assessments but asserting that it never portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat.

Bush and others in the administration repeatedly cast Iraq as a peril to the American people in the buildup to the war, but have said their comments were based on the information they were given by the CIA and other spy agencies.

Even in announcing the panel Friday, Bush defended the decision to invade Iraq, saying, “In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, I will not take risks with the lives and security of the American people by assuming the goodwill of dictators.”

The administration clearly hopes that the commission will help prevent Iraq from becoming a drag on Bush’s reelection campaign, by enabling the White House to say it is addressing the problem.

In selecting members for the panel, Bush appears to have sought to avoid highly recognized personalities who might be polarizing or create a political backlash.

Last year, the White House nominated former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger to serve as chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, only to have Kissinger bow out over objections to his refusal to disclose publicly his international business ties.

Even so, Silberman long has been seen as a partisan figure.

The former judge has long-standing Republican ties, having worked in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. He served as ambassador to Yugoslavia in 1975 and went on to work for Reagan’s campaign for the presidency in 1980.

Silberman also has been involved in a series of controversies. In September 1980, when Reagan was running against then-President Carter, Silberman and two Reagan campaign advisors met secretly with a purported emissary from Iran who offered to negotiate the release of 52 American hostages held by Iranian militants.

Critics later charged that the Reaganites were seeking to delay the hostages’ release until after the election, something Silberman and his colleagues strongly denied.

In 1990, Silberman joined a 2-1 majority vote to reverse the conviction of former White House aide Oliver L. North for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Wald, also named to the commission Friday, cast the dissenting vote in that decision.

During the 1990s, Silberman wrote a sharp-tongued opinion accusing the Clinton administration of trying to impede an independent counsel probe and asking whether the Clinton White House had “declared war on the United States.”

Robb, the other co-chairman, served as Virginia governor and held two terms as a U.S. senator before losing his reelection bid in 2001. He is a moderate Democrat.

Robb and Silberman appeared with Bush at the White House news conference announcing the commission. In later statements, both promised an independent review.

McCain would seem a risky pick for the White House. He ran against Bush in a bitterly fought race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. He is known for bucking Republican orthodoxy on Capitol Hill and pursuing issues he cares about -- including campaign finance reform and eliminating Defense Department waste -- with tenacity.

He joined in the calls for the creation of an independent commission to examine intelligence at a time when the White House was opposing the idea. But McCain supported the war in Iraq, has made recent appearances on Bush’s behalf, is likely to help campaign for him in the upcoming election and has defended the administration from charges that it manipulated the intelligence on Iraq.

Times staff writer Richard B. Schmitt contributed to this report.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Investigating Iraq intelligence

President Bush named seven people Friday to sit on an independent commission to look into problems with prewar intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs.

86, attorney, 1940-present; senior counsel, President’s Commission on Strategic Forces, 1983; presidential counsel, 1979-81.

56, president of Yale University, 1993-present; dean of graduate school, 1992-93.

67, U.S. senator from Arizona, 1986-present; congressman, U.S. House of Represen- tatives, from Arizona’s 1st District, 1982-86.

64, U.S. senator from Virginia, 1988-2001; governor of Virginia, 1982-86; son-in-law of former President Johnson.

68, retired judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit; member, Defense Policy Board, 1981-85.

64, deputy director, CIA. 1991-95; director, National Security Agency, 1988-92; director of naval intelligence, 1985-88.

75, Judge, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 1999-2001; U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, 1979-99.

Source: Associated Press