Bond works to ease tensions over prewar intelligence

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Kit Bond said Saturday he hopes a Senate investigation into prewar intelligence on Iraq can move forward without bickering over guidelines of the probe.

The Missouri Republican is part of a task force that will review the work of the Senate Intelligence Committee as it examines whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence in public statements before the Iraq war.

The task force was created after Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada invoked an arcane Senate rule and forced the chamber into a closed session.

Reid's move infuriated Bond and other Republicans, who dismissed it as a political stunt and accused Democrats of trying to draw attention away from the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

"The Democrats have thrown up roadblocks," Bond said. "They have run (the investigation) in a political manner and we have been trying to find an objective way to run it."

Besides Bond, the bipartisan task force includes five other Intelligence Committee members: Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan.; Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss.; Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., vice chairman of the committee; Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.; and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

The committee issued a report last year describing flaws in Iraq intelligence, but Democrats have pressed for the second phase of the investigation to examine about 350 public statements made by administration officials and whether they were supported by available intelligence at the time.

Republicans have added to the review more than 100 additional statements made by both Democratic and Republican members of Congress.

A key sticking point is whether committee members reviewing the statements should know who made them before deciding whether they are misleading. Democrats want names attached, while Republicans say each utterance should be reviewed without attribution.

"I am looking forward to doing the painstaking work of going through all 450 or 500 statements," Bond said. "We need to evaluate them without having names attached. Given the partisan nature that has been brought into this process, we would be having arguments over every statement."

If the committee finds statements not supported by intelligence, it would then publicly release both the statement and the speaker, Bond said.

"That's the only way to do it to avoid having a major political fight every time," Bond said. "If Democrats object to that I think that shows that their motives are purely political."

That is sure to meet with objection from some Democrats, who believe that Bush manipulated intelligence to justify going to war. At a news conference Friday, Democrats warned Roberts to conduct a thorough investigation. Republican committee staff suggested the process could last for weeks.

Bond said he expects the committee to find the vast majority of statements backed by credible intelligence.

"We already know the intelligence was not as good as it should have been," he said. "I think we should be spending our time focusing on getting the job done right now" and not "rehashing the same area."