President Bush to pick panel to investigate WMD intelligence
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President Bush
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From the Wolf Blitzer Reports staff in Atlanta:
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- With political pressure mounting and his credibility on the line, President Bush on Monday made the move he'd opposed for months, announcing he'll appoint a presidential commission to review U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
"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. But we also want to look at our war against proliferation and weapons of mass destruction in a broader context," the president told reporters at a cabinet meeting Monday.
The president says he won't name the panel until he sits down with David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group.
It was Kay's testimony last week -- that much of the intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was just plain wrong -- that gave real momentum to calls for an independent commission.
On the rationale for war, the president had already changed his tone, saying Saddam Hussein was a menace to his region, in several ways.
On that front, Bush gets critical support.
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"I think in many ways it will probably turn out that Saddam and that regime was more dangerous than we anticipated because, in fact, it was falling apart into unbelievable depravity and corruption. Everything was for sale at a price and no one was watching it," David Kay said on CNN's "Late Edition" with Wolf Blitzer.
But the White House is almost certain to draw some political fire over this commission.
A senior administration official tells CNN that Bush alone will name the panel. And White House officials say he will set a deadline for the commission's report at sometime in early-to-mid-2005, well after the November elections, diluting a potent campaign issue for Democrats.
While the deadline takes the commission's final conclusions off the table for the 2004 presidential campaign, preliminary findings could also be beneficial.
"If they reach some preliminary conclusions at the halfway point -- like, they spent way too much on satellite technology -- maybe at mid-point in the investigation, some preliminary finding would be good for the country."
"We're really talking about a one-year investigation," says New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. "We already know what that conclusion is going to be. So maybe at midpoint some kind of preliminary findings would be very useful for the country."
