Rep. George Miller Calls on Repuublican Leaders in House and Senate to Convene Hearings on Bush/Cheney Leak of Iraq War Data

WASHINGTON – Congress should convene in-depth hearings on the leak of classified pre-war intelligence on Iraq by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Democratic Policy Committee, said today. Miller said that the Bush Administration can no longer be trusted to be in control of information regarding its own actions to justify the war.

“The mounting evidence indicates that the President and the Vice President selectively released classified pre-war information in a deliberate effort to manipulate public opinion about the Administration’s tenuous justifications for taking America to war in Iraq,” said Miller. “Our nation and this Congress deserve to know exactly what the President did, when he did it, and why. The time has long passed to stop spinning the facts in the case of leaked classified information and the disclosure of a covert CIA agent’s identity. Enough damage has been done to individuals and the credibility of our nation.

“It appears that the President and Vice President selectively released pre-war intelligence for political purposes and not, as they claim, to further inform the debate about the war. They did not leak the entire National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq but one select portion. And yet they knew at the time that the CIA and the State Department had already cast serious doubt on the credibility of that one select portion leaked to the news media. The Vice President’s chief of staff reportedly told The New York Times that the information he was leaking to it was a key finding of the Estimate when in fact it was not, according to published reports.

“They leaked this information to try to salvage their rationale for going to war, to punish a credible critic of the decision to go to war, and to mislead the public and Congress.

“President Bush can no longer be trusted to control the information about pre-war intelligence. There is no option but for Congress to announce it will hold in-depth hearings on this issue and that the White House must turn over all relevant information to the Congress to allow it to fully understand what has transpired in this very serious case. The actions by the President and the Vice President, and the apparent hypocrisy they have displayed on this issue since it first was made public in 2003, demands a thorough investigation by Congress.”

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