The Bush administration has repeatedly hidden behind what it terms "bad intelligence" for its ill-fated decision to invade Iraq. As those of us who didn't buy what the administration was pushing in the lead-up to war, this is just the latest in a long series of misrepresentations and finger pointing. Indeed, while the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence arrived at the (shocking!) conclusion that pre-war predictions about Saddam's WMD capability were well off the mark, the fact remains that that committee has yet to complete its mission by addressing the issue of how the intel was used.

What we do know at this point, however, is how it was used to secure Congressional approval for the use of force against Saddam's Iraq.

Senator Bob Graham, in his book, recounts a Sept 5, 2002 meeting he and Senators Durbin and Levin had with then CIA director George Tenet and his staff. Though the administration had long before decided on invasion, to the senators' amazement no National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq had yet been produced. Graham, Durbin and Levin demanded to see one, and three weeks later Tenet produced a 90-page document rife with caveats and qualifications (though these were buried in footnotes) about what we knew--or didn't know--about WMD in Iraq.

That report was classified, and as such was available only to those on the House and Senate intelligence committees. Graham pressed for it to be declassified, and got what he asked for on Oct 4--one week before Congress was to vote on the use of force. However, this declassified version was more like a marketing brochure: 20 pages in length, slickly produced with splashy grahics and maps, and devoid of any of the caveats contained in the original. Graham described it later as "a vivid and terrifying case for war."

This piece of propaganda--let's call it what it is--was the only information on WMD our senators and representatives had on which to base their decision on the use of force. And they had one week to make up their mind.

Bush has since made the claim that Congress had access to the same intel that the administration did, but that clearly is a lie. What Congress had was what the administration was willing to give them, namely a promotional piece whose lies of omission outweighed what was included by a factor of four.

The Senate committee on intelligence needs to finish the job it started and determine just what was left out of that 20-page brochure.