Ex-Weapons Inspector Kay Briefs Bush

President Bush got a firsthand briefing Monday from former chief weapons inspector David Kay on America’s intelligence failures in Iraq, as political infighting swirled around Bush’s plan to create a blue-ribbon commission this week to investigate the matter.

Democratic leaders in Congress charged that a panel created and appointed by Bush would not be independent enough, and they argued that it should conclude its work before November’s presidential election. The White House said the commission would be bipartisan and that it wouldn’t be asked to report until next year in order to remove it from election-year politics.

Kay said in a telephone interview that he and Bush talked for 90 minutes over lunch about Kay’s six-month effort to find the weapons of mass destruction that the White House had cited as the chief rationale for invading Iraq. Kay, who resigned last month as chief of the Iraq Survey Group, said that they did not talk about the proposed commission and that Bush did not ask him to be a member.

“The mandate, I hope, will be to look at what happened in Iraq, and why there were differences between the estimates and the reality,” said Kay. “And more broadly, why the system failed and what can be done to fix the problems.”

Kay said that his “model” for the inquiry would be the special commission named by President Reagan to investigate the January 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger shortly after it was launched. White House aides have suggested the intelligence probe will be patterned after the Warren Commission. That panel, which was created by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to kill Kennedy.

Neither commission was investigating what Democrats say should be studied in the case of Iraq: allegations of potential wrongdoing by senior administration officials, including the White House.

Kay told the Senate last week that he was convinced Iraq had no stockpiles of nerve gas or chemical weapons before the war, and no programs in place to produce them in significant quantities. The CIA and several congressional committees already are investigating the prewar intelligence regarding the size and scope of Saddam Hussein’s supposed illicit weapons, but Kay urged the administration to appoint an outside inquiry to lend additional credibility.

Although the Bush administration previously had rejected calls for an independent review, Kay’s blunt comments sparked a torrent of fresh criticism at home and abroad of the decision to go to war based on allegedly faulty intelligence.

Hoping to quell the controversy, the White House reversed course over the weekend and said the president would sign an executive order in coming days to appoint a nine-member bipartisan panel to study U.S. intelligence on Iraq and other elusive terror targets.

In London, meanwhile, a spokesman said British Prime Minister Tony Blair would follow Bush’s lead and appoint a commission to investigate faulty intelligence before Blair’s government joined the United States in going to war with Iraq.

Speaking to reporters Monday, Bush again defended his decision to go to war. “We do know that Saddam Hussein had the intent and capabilities to cause great harm,” Bush said.

“What we don’t know yet is what we thought and what the Iraq Survey Group has found, and we want to look at that,” Bush added. “But we also want to look at our war against proliferation and weapons of mass destruction, kind of in a broader context. And so, I’m putting together an independent, bipartisan commission to analyze where we stand, what we can do better, as we fight this war against terror.”

The president did not set a deadline for the commission to report its findings, and he sidestepped a question about whether voters were owed an explanation before the election.

“In terms of the timeline, I would just stress that it is important that the commission’s work is done in a way that it doesn’t become embroiled in partisan politics,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

In a letter to Bush, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), the House Democratic leader, warned it would be “a serious mistake” for the president rather than the congressional leadership to appoint the commission.

“One of the major questions ... is whether senior administration officials, including members of the Cabinet and senior White House officials, misled the Congress and the public about the nature of the threat from Iraq,” the Democratic leaders wrote. “Even some of your own statements and those of Vice President [Dick] Cheney need independent scrutiny. A commission appointed and controlled by the White House will not have the independence or credibility necessary to investigate these issues.”

Among those who signed the letter was Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That committee has “reviewed every piece of intelligence underlying prewar assessments” and will issue a draft report to members Thursday, according to Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the committee.

“If the president’s panel has anything to add to this effort in the Senate, we would be pleased to receive it,” Roberts said.