Global Policy Forum

By David E. Sanger

President Bush will establish a bipartisan commission in the next few days to examine American intelligence operations, including a study of possible misjudgments about Iraq's unconventional weapons, senior administration officials said Sunday. They said the panel would also investigate failures to penetrate secretive governments and stateless groups that could attempt new attacks on the United States.

The president's decision came after a week of rising pressure on the White House from both Democrats and many ranking Republicans to deal with what the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee has called "egregious" errors that overstated Iraq's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and made the country appear far closer to developing nuclear weapons than it actually was.

Mr. Bush's agreement to set up a commission to study the Iraq intelligence failures was first reported Sunday by The Washington Post. The officials described the commission Mr. Bush will create as a broader examination of American intelligence shortcomings — from Iran to North Korea to Libya — of which the Iraqi experience was only a part.

The pressure to establish such a panel became irresistible after David A. Kay, the former chief weapons inspector, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that "it turns out we were all wrong, probably," about the perceived Iraqi threat, which was the administration's basic justification for the war.

The commission will not report back until after the November elections. Some former officials who have been approached about taking part say they believe it may take 18 months or more to reach its conclusions. "It became clear to the president that he couldn't sit there and seem uninterested in the fact that the Iraq intel went off the rails," said one senior official involved in the discussions. "He had to do something, and he chose to enlarge the problem, beyond the Iraq experience."

White House officials said the president was still completing a list of who would serve on the commission, expected to have about nine members. Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said Sunday that they were talking to "very distinguished statesmen and women, who have served their country and who have been users of intelligence, or served in a gathering capacity." Among those who have been consulted, officials say, is Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser under Mr. Bush's father. Mr. Scowcroft, who was a harsh critic of the process by which the current president decided to go to war, is currently the head of a foreign intelligence advisory board and it is unclear if he will play a role in the new commission.

Mr. Bush's effort is intended to put the study into a broader context — the retooling of American intelligence-gathering for a new era of terrorism and nuclear proliferation by rogue scientists and countries that may pass weapons into the hands of groups like Al Qaeda. But it is far from clear that those steps will insulate him from Democrats' charges that the White House tried to manipulate the Iraq intelligence to justify the March invasion.

Nor is it clear whether the commission's broader mandate will keep it from delving too deeply into the specific failures by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies in the case of Iraq. Mr. Bush has been trying to avoid identifying individuals or agencies responsible for the Iraq failures. Senior administration officials concede they do not want to risk further alienating the C.I.A. or the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet.

In interviews on Sunday, White House officials rejected direct comparisons to the commission that is examining the intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks, or the commission that issued a blistering critique of NASA after the Columbia disaster a year ago. Instead, a senior White House official said Sunday afternoon, Mr. Bush intends to order a look "at the global security challenges of the 21st century."

The draft of the executive order specifically orders the commission to compare intelligence about Iraq with what was found on the ground there. But it is not clear whether the commission will decide to delve into issues beyond how the intelligence was gathered, and specifically how it was used. In the case of Iraq, that could put the commission into the midst of the politically charged question of whether the most dire-sounding possibilities were de-emphasized by Bush administration officials to build a national and international consensus on the need to take military action. The White House has denied any such effort to filter the intelligence.

"It has to have that included," Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on Fox News, making an argument that has divided Democrats and Republicans for months in the debate in Congress about prewar intelligence. "And that is still not settled."

While other studies of American intelligence lapses have been ordered by past administrations, none has taken place at the level of a presidential commission. Nor have they operated in the midst of a heated political debate over whether the president was the victim of bad intelligence, as Republicans argue, or whether he sought to cherry-pick the evidence that would justify the decision to go to war, as many of the Democratic candidates for president have contended.

Officials familiar with the discussions over the creation of the commission say that besides the Iraq experience, the commission may examine the failure to detect preparations for the nuclear tests that Pakistan and India set off in 1998, missed signals about how quickly Iran and Libya were moving toward a bomb with the aid of Pakistani scientists, and Al Qaeda's focus on an attack on the American mainland. In Dr. Kay's testimony, he noted that the same intelligence agencies that overestimated Iraq's abilities seemed to have underestimated Iran's and Libya's, and still cannot get a clear fix on North Korea's.

Only last week, asked about setting up an inquiry, Mr. Bush said he would await the findings of the Iraq Survey Group, which was asked to find Iraq's unconventional weapons and which Dr. Kay led until last month. But it quickly became clear, White House officials said, that that position was untenable.

Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said last week that he would not stand in the way of an independent intelligence inquiry as long as it did not interfere with the months-long investigation by his panel, which plans to distribute a draft report to members of Congress on Thursday. The Senate panel "for the last six, seven, eight, nine months, has had 10 staffers working 24/7 on floor-to-ceiling documents and doing the most thorough investigative job on the entire intelligence community that's been done in 20 years," Mr. Roberts said in an interview last week. "We now have our draft report. I would at least like to get the draft report out and make it public, and then if people feel like they have to have an independent investigation, that's fine."

Mr. Roberts has said the draft report by his committee staff had found no evidence that the Bush administration put pressure on intelligence analysts to exaggerate the dangers posed by Iraq — a conclusion that matches one offered by Dr. Kay in his testimony last week. But the Senate report is expected to be highly critical of the Central Intelligence Agency and its counterparts.

Representative Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and one of the C.I.A.'s closest allies in Congress, said in an interview on Friday that "unless we're prepared for another intelligence failure, we need to get about the business of improving our intelligence service." Mr. Goss added, however, that he believed that any new broad-based reviews should be forward-looking — exactly the path Mr. Bush appears to have chosen.

One senior House Republican aide said an independent review could also have a political benefit for Republicans by providing a forum to attack Democrats for shortchanging intelligence in previous years, an emerging Republican theme against Senator John Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president. Mr. Kerry has been particularly blistering in his assessment of how Mr. Bush used American intelligence, saying he was "misled" by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell as they urged him and his colleagues to vote for a resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.

Congressional officials said Sunday that Mr. Cheney had been in contact with leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee from both parties to discuss a possible blueprint for a broad, independent review of the state of American intelligence agencies. But Mr. Cheney, known for his reticence, gave little indication of what form the inquiry might take.

Mr. Cheney himself has much at stake in the path the commission takes: He offered some of the most dire statements about Iraq's abilities in the months leading up to the war. "It's not surprising," one White House official said, "that he's been so involved in the creation of the commission."

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