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You have probably already seen this at Atrios', but just in case:
MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you something that you wrote in your report on this very subject: “The White House determined, and the DCI and CIA agreed, that the Joint Inquiry could have no access to the [President’s Daily Briefing].”This was the briefing President Bush was given in August of 2001.
“Ultimately, this bar was extended to the point where CIA personnel were not allowed to be interviewed regarding the simple process by which the PDB is prepared. Although the inquiry was inadvertently given access to fragments of some PDB items early on, this decision limited the inquiry’s ability to determine systematically what Presidents Clinton and Bush, and their senior advisers, were being told by the intelligence community agencies, and when, regarding the nature of the threat to the United States from Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.”
And the very day I read that in the report, I read this in The Washington Post: “Cheney laid out a detailed rationale for the war Bush launched on March 20, quoting at length from declassified sections of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq issued in October. White House officials have cited the NIE as the basis for prewar pre-war speeches about Iraq. ... As part of an effort to rebut criticism that it had exaggerated the threat, the White House last Friday released eight pages of excerpts from the intelligence report,” which had been classified.
Senator Graham, why would we declassify the National Intelligence Report to buttress arguments about the war in Iraq but keep classified some information that could help us find out what our leaders knew was coming down before September 11?
SEN. GRAHAM: Well, I think one of the fundamental reasons for that is to avoid accountability
Which is the point. The Bush Administration has no qualms about declassifying material when they think it well help them politically. It seems so very much more reluctant to do so when all it could do is help provide the American people of where, exactly, the failings were before 9/11.
