E-Mail This Article to a Friend Worse than it looks The Senate Intelligence Committee lets Bush off the hook. Plus, prison reform gets a boost, and the Republicans seek to intimidate entertainers.

THE SENATE Intelligence Committee’s report on the run-up to the war in Iraq is a devastating compendium of malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance. But for the Bush administration, it could have been — should have been — much worse.

According to the committee’s unanimous conclusions, the CIA’s judgment that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed chemical and biological weapons was deeply flawed — so much so that it wasn’t even supported by the intelligence agencies’ own data. Former CIA director George Tenet’s claims to the contrary, it was by no means a "slam dunk" that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, the White House’s principal rationale for waging war.

"Before the war, the United States intelligence community told the president, as well as the Congress and the public, that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and if left unchecked would probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade. Well, today we know these assessments were wrong, and as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," said Republican senator Pat Roberts, who chairs the committee, at the unveiling of the report last Friday.

By this construct, George W. Bush can claim to have been misled. But that would be far too generous. In fact, by prior agreement, Roberts and his Democratic vice-chair, Senator Jay Rockefeller, considered only how the CIA and other intelligence agencies did their jobs, putting aside the question of what the White House did with that intelligence — and how it helped shape that intelligence — until after the presidential election. If Bush wins this fall, and if we then learn that he and his administration intentionally twisted intelligence to suit their war aims (which would hardly be a surprise, given their track record), then Americans will have been done an immense disservice. They will have been deprived of a crucial piece of information that they needed to make an informed choice at the ballot box.

Tenet did a miserable enough job that it would be too kind to call him a scapegoat. But there is ample evidence that he was only providing the Bush team with what it wanted. Over the past year, we have learned that Vice-President Dick Cheney was a frequent visitor to CIA headquarters, where his presence was widely interpreted as a warning that the agency had better provide the rationale for war that the White House sought. (The report’s finding that Cheney did not unduly influence intelligence-gathering comes across as naive.) Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith set up what amounted to a rival intelligence operation at the Pentagon, steering the lies and misrepresentations of Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi straight to the top. National-security adviser Condoleezza Rice publicly claimed that aluminum tubes sought by Iraq could only be used for nuclear weapons, even though the US government’s own experts had already dismissed that notion. President Bush himself asserted in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium from an African country, even though the CIA had already told the White House that claim rested on a shaky foundation. (The tale of the Nigerien uranium has recently gotten a new life; see "Media," This Just In, page 6.)

The Senate Intelligence Committee report is valuable as far as it goes. But by portraying Bush and his administration as victims of bad intelligence rather than perpetrators of a tragically misguided policy, it lets the White House off the hook. To its credit, the committee blamed administration officials, rather than the intelligence agencies, for sounding false alarms about ties between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda, ties that now appear to have been non-existent. But the war in Iraq was and is a Bush operation from start to finish. Reforming intelligence operations is important — but not nearly as important as turning Bush and Cheney out of office this November.

Fourteen years ago, Bill Weld was elected governor of Massachusetts while promising to introduce prison inmates to "the joys of busting rocks." It was a time when much of society, sick and scared of crime, sought vengeance and retribution rather than education and rehabilitation, never thinking of how these shortsighted impulses would eventually create more problems than they would solve.

Times have changed. In California, an effort is afoot to reform the "three strikes and you’re out" law, which has resulted in such cruel absurdities as handing people with two prior convictions life sentences for such relatively minor crimes as shoplifting. Federal judges are speaking out against mandatory-minimum sentences, which make it illegal for them to temper vengeance with fair justice.

Now comes the report of the Governor’s Commission on Corrections Reform, whose basic premise is one that Weld and his ilk forgot: 97 percent of inmates eventually return to society. It is a matter of common sense that the best way to protect public safety is to ensure that these inmates are prepared to be productive members of society after they have served their time.

The 15-member commission, chaired by former state attorney general Scott Harshbarger, was charged with studying ways to reform the state’s Department of Correction following the prison murder last year of convicted pedophile John Geoghan, a defrocked priest. Accordingly, the report was unveiled at a news conference held on the grounds of the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, in Shirley, the scene of Geoghan’s murder.

Much of the Harshbarger commission’s report focuses on internal matters, such as a pattern that suggests prison guards have been abusing sick time. But the commission’s most significant recommendations — that an inspector general be named to investigate complaints filed by inmates, and that an external monitoring committee be created — could make prison a less brutal, more rehabilitative experience for inmates.

The commission also recommended that the Department of Correction’s top priority should be to prepare inmates so that they do not re-offend when they are released from prison. As Harshbarger was recently quoted as saying, "Often people are coming out more dangerous than when they went in." That has to stop.

Governor Mitt Romney was full of praise for the Harshbarger commission, calling its report "a great leap forward." Pardon our skepticism. As a conservative Republican, Romney would appear to be straight out of the busting-rocks school of penology. Still, the Massachusetts prison system is a mess not of Romney’s making, which means he has no stake in defending the status quo. The corrections commissioner he named in the wake of the Geoghan murder, Kathleen Dennehy, has thus far been reasonably progressive in her approach. Romney should take the Harshbarger report to heart, and use it to transform the state’s prison system into a national model.

You could call it a McCarthyite witch hunt, except that would elevate this pathetic bit of diversionary nonsense to a level it does not deserve. This past Tuesday, Bush-Cheney campaign manager Ken Mehlman sent a letter to John Kerry’s campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, demanding that she turn over videotapes of entertainers who appeared at a Radio City Music Hall fundraising event the previous Thursday.

The entertainers, you see, made fun of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Whoopi Goldberg reportedly observed that the president’s name is sometimes used to describe female pubic hair. Oh, my. John Mellencamp unveiled a new song referring to Bush as a "cheap thug." Republicans and their allies also claim that Bush was referred to as a "killer," but that appears to be — how to say this? — a lie.

"Do most Americans in their hearts, think that calling the President a ‘thug’ and a ‘killer’ represents the ‘heart and soul’ of our nation? We don’t think so, but we think voters should decide for themselves by watching the celebrities John Kerry said captured the ‘heart and soul’ of America," Mehlman wrote, escalating a campaign he began almost as soon as the show ended last week.

Kerry, through Cahill, has already disavowed the most offensive of the entertainers’ comments. That’s more than enough. What the Bush-Cheney forces really want is provocative content for their media allies — principally the Fox News Channel and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. This would serve two purposes: to hold Kerry and John Edwards up to mockery for allegedly being out of touch with mainstream values, and to intimidate entertainers who dare speak out against Republican hegemony.

Come to think of it, maybe this is worthy of Joe McCarthy after all.

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