Something to consider:
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee announced this weekend that it will investigate charges of exaggerated intelligence. The House Intelligence panel has already announced its own inquiry. Hearings, probably behind closed doors, will include questioning of intelligence analysts about their work.
Though the aide said the president does not resent the idea of a congressional investigation, Bush asserted that the United States went to war to respond to a very real threat.
"Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in '91, in '98, in 2003. He continually ignored the demands of the free world, so the United States and friends and allies acted," Bush said. "And this is for certain: Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States and our friends and allies."
Centrist Democrats of the Democratic Leadership Council, quibble with the president on many fronts, this time agree with Bush, saying the hunt for weapons of mass destruction is not cause for argument.
"If the Bush administration was wrong about Saddam's WMD program, so, too, was just about everybody else, including U.N. inspectors, the French, the Germans, the Russians and the Chinese, all of whom accepted prior evidence of such a program is beyond doubt," the DLC said in a statement.
Evidence or no evidence, many familiar with the intelligence say they believe Saddam voluntarily gave up his weapons after inspectors left in 1998.
"Some are suggesting, certainly, that he destroyed the weapons after 1998 or maybe even sooner," Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., ranking member of the House intelligence Committee, told Fox News. "It's just counterintuitive that he would have done that. His would have been the greatest intelligence hoax of all time, fooling every intelligence agency, three presidents, five secretaries of defense and the entire world into thinking he still had the weapons."
Fox News' Jim Angle contributed to this report.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,89583,00.html