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SENATORS CONVENE NEW INTELLIGENCE REVIEW BOARD
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ShareSeptember 19, 2006 1:07 PM
ABC's Z. Byron Wolf reports: An odd bipartisan grouping of Senators, including Senator Ron Wyden D-OR, on the left and Senators Kit Bond, R-MO, and Orrin Hatch, R-UT, on the right -- all members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- complain that the intelligence community was a bit too conservative in what it chose to allow the committee to release with its Phase II assessment of the pre-Iraq war intelligence. The Senators are, for the first time, asking an independent review board, headquartered at the National Archives, to reconsider the the decisions by the intelligence community.
The Senate committee released its report on Friday, Sept. 8. The vote by several Republicans with Democrats on the committee allowed the conclusions drawn to be more critical than expected of the Bush administration and the intelligence community in their use of intelligence provided by the Iraqi National Congress and a comparison of pre-war claims vs. actual post-war intelligence.
The committee voted to release the reports to the public after an interagency intelligence review by the Department of Defense and the rest of the Intelligence Community determined which parts could be disseminated to the public. Find declassified versions of the reports, okayed for public consumption, on the committee's website: LINK
"Although I disagree with a number of conclusions in these reports and believe the partisan conclusions the committee voted upon are not necessarily supported by the evidence within the reports themselves, I do agree with my colleagues that too much of the report remains classified, and I am a firm believer that whatever need not remain classified, should not remain classified," Bond said.
Wyden, Hatch and Bond, joined by Democratic Senators Diane Feinstein, CA, Russ Feingold, WI, and Jay Rockefeller, WV, and Republican Senators Mike DeWine, OH, in asking the board to look at the reports.
"Many portions of this report have been inappropriately classified, even though releasing them would not impact national security," Wyden said. "The American people have the right to know the rest of this story, so that they can decide for themselves whether to hold public officials accountable for the statements that were made and actions that were taken that led us to war."
The board is made up of political appointees from both parties, including former staffers for Congressional Intelligence committees and a former Inspector General of the CIA. It was authorized in law back in 2000, but not actually funded until this year. While it does not have the ability to declassify information, its findings could be used to repetition the official intelligence declassifiers.
Here is more on the board:
LINK
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