As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, I probably had as much access to the intelligence on which the war was predicated as any other member of Congress.

That seems to imply that all members of Congress had access to the classified NIE.

The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs.”

This states that the unclassified version was for the public, not for Congress. Why wouldn’t he directly say that Congress “needed to know these reservations” as well? Because they had access to the full NIE that “contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information” (Graham’s words about the NIE).

On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.

This is Graham’s closing paragraph. His last sentence is the only indication that Congress did not have access to the full NIE. But that is contradicted by all his previous statements in the same article.

Therefore, Graham does NOT make “it quite clear that the NIE version made available to the entire Congress was not the same one that the Intelligence committee saw.”

Graham’s closing is nothing more than a diversion from his entire article. He tries to imply that the poor, underinformed Congress never had a chance to know the truth (after saying just the opposite in the middle of the article) when his real argument is that the public was underinformed.

Tenet produced a 90-page document…That report was classified, and as such was available only to those on the House and Senate intelligence committees.

Frameone,

Either you are misreading Graham or Graham is lying. Here is another source that thinks the entire Congress had access to the classified version…

From the WaPo (11/12/05):

Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote.

There are two angles to argue:

1) Did the Bush administration mislead Congress by withholding information? The demonstratable answer is NO based on what was contained in the NIE available to Congress. Therefore, the main point of this thread by OW is fatally flawed.
2) Did the Bush administration mislead the public by withholding information? The demonstratable answer is YES based on the certainty with which they told everyone that there were WMD. Therefore, OW should change his focus from a misled Congress to a misled public (IMHO).

You should also reread what Graham is trying to argue.

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–less than a 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 with none of the caveats contained in the original. Graham described it later as “a vivid and terrifying case for war.”

This 20-page, unqualified summary was presented to our senators and representatives as the best information on Iraq’s WMDs, and it was provided to them one week before the vote on the use of force. The intelligence material Congress had was what the administration was willing to give them, namely a promotional piece whose lies of omission outweighed what was included.

http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/realitycheck.html

Graham further confirms the point that the unclassified NIE released by the CIA only days before the Iraq vote bore little resemblance to the fully caveated classified version. But we, the public, of course did not know that.

So why didn’t those could have known call the administration on it? Is it because no more than six senators and a handful of House members bothered reading past the 5-page executive summary of the NIE before casting what may have been the most important vote of their congressional careers?
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/11/20/95014/004

Not in its entirety according to Graham

No, he never states Congress did not have access to the classified NIE. He only complains about the edited unclassified “public” version.

Is Graham “lying” by leading you to believe that Congress did not have access to the version with dissenting opinions?

Not in its entirety according to Graham:  I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.

The Factcheck.org post only knows what was in the portion of the NIE released by the Bush administration. There were 93 pages almost entirely redacted. It doesn’t have the full picture.

Q.E.D.

Again, Graham having access to a bunch of data that say that some specific Mohamed told some specific Farah about a bomb in the Cazbah …..doesn’t suggest that he had any extra USEFUL intel. And if he DID have extra useful intel, why didn’t he force it’s distribution to congress?

“At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein’s capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.”

Idiot.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/18/AR2005111802397.html

Second, Graham is on the record as saying that he had access to more intelligence than his colleagues. And he did demand that more information be made available. Did you even read his article? Are you also calling him a liar?

“ all the congresscritters had the classified memo available.

Care to give us the link to this information? ”

Link given

Again you attempt to parse this down. How many other members saw the mysterious “Graham version”. How many democrats? If Graham felt so strongly, why not demand further classified info be given to congress? You mean to tell me that graham is so ethically challenged that he couldn’t develop the stones to do that?

It appears that your cite and frameone’s don’t contradict each other.

The Factcheck.org article says that Congress received a version of the NIE in 2002.

In the article frameone cites, Graham describes that as a limited version that withheld dissenting opinions on key findings.

The factcheck.org report refers to report it says was released to Congress in “October of 2002″ with no specific day titled: “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

Here’s the site that sort of clears this up: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/#doc15

It’s important to point out there’s still no way of knowing what was in the “Continuing” report because the White House has only released the Key Judgements section of the report and redacted most of the rest of the 93 page document. And yet Factcheck takes the Key Judgements section as proof enough that Congres saw all the intelligence. But the key judgement sections of the report released includes dissenting analysis on only two issues:

“The released key judgments section is also notable for its reporting of dissents within the Intelligence Community on two related issues – when Iraq could acquire a nuclear weapon, and its motive in seeking to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes.”

These were the dissents presented by the State Department and Department of Energy, dissents which “senior Bush administration officials” had been downplaying as “footnotes” in the New York Times in articles written by Judith Miller.

At the same time, the key judgements section also mentions evidence about biological and chemical weapons labs and Hussein’s links to al-qaeda presented without any mention of the dissenting opinions about this evidence and its sources known at the time by the intelligence community as listed in the Washington Monthly post I link to.

Factcheck.org overplays what it knows because most of the document it cites is redacted. If those redacted portions didn’t include all the dissenting information that we now know existed and was circulating within the intelligence community then Congress didn’t get the same information. At this point it’s impossible to know if Congress got all the same intelligence because we don’t know what was in the actual NIE that was shown to Congress.

Here’s what we do know for a fact according to Graham: The public summary of the NIE released on Oct. 4 by Tenet contained no dissenting opinions at all. Why did the Bush administration decide that the public had no right to know that there were dissenting opinions about WMDs in Iraq?

“The President’s main point is correct: the CIA and most other US intelligence agencies believed before the war that Saddam had stocks of biological and chemical weapons, was actively working on nuclear weapons and “probably” would have a nuclear weapon before the end of this decade. That faulty intelligence was shared with Congress  along with multiple mentions of some doubts within the intelligence community  in a formal National Intelligence Estimate just prior to the Senate and House votes to authorize the use of force against Iraq.

No hard evidence has surfaced to support claims that Bush somehow manipulated the findings of intelligence analysts. In fact, two bipartisan investigations probed for such evidence and said they found none. So Dean’s claim that intelligence was “corrupted” is unsupported.”

“The intelligence to which Bush refers is contained in a top-secret document that was made available to all members of Congress in October 2002, days before the House and Senate voted to authorize Bush to use force in Iraq. This so-called National Intelligence Estimate was supposed to be the combined US intelligence community’s “most authoritative written judgment concerning a specific national security issue,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The report was titled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

Emphasis mine

Here’s the link…http://www.factcheck.org/article358.html

Any more questions kids?

 all the congresscritters had the classified memo available.

Care to give us the link to this information?

Link:

The intelligence to which Bush refers is contained in a top-secret document that was made available to all members of Congress in October 2002, days before the House and Senate voted to authorize Bush to use force in Iraq. This so-called National Intelligence Estimate was supposed to be the combined US intelligence community’s “most authoritative written judgment concerning a specific national security issue,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

DRpedro,
That’s why Senators like Edwards say they were misled. They believed the Administration when they saw the unclassified NIE. Graham was not allowed to tell them what was different from the declassified and classified NIE without violating his security clearance. Graham was on the intelligence committee. Members of the intelligence committee have higher security clearance than the rest of the Senate. They get to see things that the rest of the Senate does not see.