Daschle Says The Sen­ate Was Lied To On Iraq:

Speak­ing Wednes­day at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty, Daschle also said he had been giv­en “mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion” about Iraq’s weapons before the war, but said he could not go into specifics.
“I wish I could share with you the mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion I per­son­al­ly was pro­vid­ed in Sep­tem­ber and Octo­ber of 2002,” he said in remarks sched­uled for deliv­ery at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty in Evanston.

The mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions, Daschle said, under­score the need for Con­gress to repair the nation’s for­eign pol­i­cy ini­tia­tives in order to restore the pub­lic’s trust in the use of U.S. mil­i­tary power.

Some peo­ple defend the admin­is­tra­tion’s lies about Iraq’s WMDs by say­ing that Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors said the same things. 

Fine, but the rea­son we want real hear­ings on the polit­i­cal manip­u­la­tion of intel­li­gence is that there are ques­tions about how these Sen­a­tors got the infor­ma­tion they were speak­ing about. If an NSC briefer told the Sen­a­tors that Iraq tried to buy ura­ni­um in Niger, and then the Sen­a­tors went out an repeat­ed the claim, who should bear the blame?

If it were a sub­ject which involved pub­licly avail­able infor­ma­tion, I’d say the Sen­a­tor. “Trust but ver­i­fy” as they say. But intel­li­gence infor­ma­tion at this lev­el is clas­si­fied out the ass. The only source avail­able was the exec­u­tive branch, and that’s where the inquiry has to focus.

This isn’t par­ti­san, it’s practical.