WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The White House is resisting a move by both Republicans and Democrats to fully declassify a Senate report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Republicans say the public disclosure would help show that the CIA made honest mistakes in its 2002 assessment that Iraq owned stockpiles of WMDs, when in fact it no longer did.
But the White House believes the declassification would trigger another round of negative news media coverage and Democratic-led congressional hearings, said a Senate Republican, who asked to remain anonymous because of ongoing private discussions.
The dispute revolves around an obscure federal panel, the nine-member Public Interest Declassification Board.
Last November, incoming Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and the outgoing chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., signed a letter to the board asking for a review of two committee reports.
One report compared the CIA’s pre-war estimate of Iraq’s WMDs with what was actually uncovered by inspectors in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. The other focused on how the intelligence community used intelligence provided by the Iraqi National Congress, a dissident group in opposition to Saddam Hussein.
Both reports contained blacked-out passages on information the Bush administration declined to declassify.
In a move that surprised some board members, Stephen Hadley, President Bush’s national security adviser, personally got involved negotiating the terms of the review. He told the board in a private meeting that he wanted the National Security Council staff to write the board’s bylaws, which dictate how they declassify a document.
Hadley’s spokesman did not return a phone and an e-mail message.
Under the 2000 law establishing the board, it cannot initiate a review. The president must authorize one. Two pending Senate bills would give the panel the power to recommend declassification on its own, but the White House opposes the legislation on grounds the executive branch should solely control such decisions.
The board is encountering other problems. Congress created it to tackle what some lawmakers consider an over-classification of executive branch documents. But to date, the panel has not made one recommendation on declassification, said a Jan. 19 letter from its chairman, Britt Snider, a former CIA inspector general.
The White House also has failed to fill two vacancies, and the board must compete with The National Archives for funding.
“This puts us at a significant disadvantage as we seek to discharge our responsibilities,” Snider said.
What’s more, the board goes out of existence next year unless Congress reauthorizes it. A board set up to combat excessive secrecy might go extinct without ever declassifying a single executive branch document.
rscarborough@dcexaminer.com