Bush to Form Intelligence Probe Panel

President Bush announced Monday he would form an independent panel to help uncover “all the facts” about U.S. intelligence on Iraqi weapons, even as Democratic critics questioned whether the panel would be impartial and complained its findings wouldn’t be out until after the presidential election.

Bush also met privately with former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay for the first time since Kay urged creation of such a commission and said he didn’t believe Iraq had the illegal weapons Bush claimed.

The president continued to defend his decision to invade Iraq. “We do know that Saddam Hussein had the intent and the capabilities to cause great harm, we know he was a danger,” Bush said.

However, he added that the administration wanted to compare prewar intelligence with findings by Kay and his inspectors – and see how the intelligence system might be improved for the future.

“What we don’t know yet is what we thought and what the Iraqi Survey Group has found, and we want to look at that,” Bush said.

“But we also want to look at our war against proliferation and weapons of mass destruction, kind of in a broader context. And so I’m putting together an independent, bipartisan commission to analyze where we stand, what we can do better as we fight this war against terror.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a published interview, meantime, that he was unsure whether he would have recommended an invasion of Iraq had he been told there was no evidence Saddam had stockpiles of banned weapons.

“I don’t know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world,” he said in an interview in Tuesday editions of The Washington Post.

He said the “absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get.”

However, Powell said, history will judge that going to war with Iraq “was the right thing to do.”

In London, meanwhile, a spokesman said British Prime Minister Tony Blair would follow Bush’s lead and appoint a commission to investigate faulty intelligence before Blair’s government joined the United States in going to war with Iraq.

Blair was to announce the inquiry on Tuesday.

Bush spoke before meeting with Kay, who last week described a broad intelligence failure on Iraq. The former inspector gave Bush “his impressions and what he’s learned,” said White House press secretary Scott McClellan.

The White House has mentioned no names as possible leaders of the nine-member commission, but lawmakers and intelligence experts have suggested that among the most qualified would be Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser for Bush’s father, and former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H. Scowcroft led a classified review of intelligence in 2001 and heads Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; Rudman co-chaired a task force on terrorist threats.

Scowcroft was traveling and unavailable for comment; Rudman declined to comment when asked about the commission.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., last week suggested the commission include former House Speaker Tom Foley, D-Wash., former Secretary of State and Treasury George Shultz, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and Scowcroft.

Democratic congressional leaders sent a letter to Bush on Monday, urging him to support a truly independent commission.

The panel should not be appointed by and report to the White House, the senators told Bush, especially since “even some of your own statements and those of Vice President (Dick) Cheney need independent scrutiny.”

And Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination to oppose Bush in November, said, “The American people deserve answers to this before the election.”

Fellow candidate Wesley Clark said: “The real issue is not just the intelligence, it’s how the administration used the intelligence. So the object of inquiry must not just be the intelligence community, it must be the way the policy was made.”

The letter to Bush from the congressional leaders said, “One of the major questions that needs to be addressed is whether senior administration officials … misled the Congress and the public about the nature of the threat from Iraq.”

It was signed by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota; Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California.

In describing the commission, Bush spokesman McClellan used the word “broad” or “broadly” more than 20 times to emphasize that the panel would be tasked with looking into not only Iraq intelligence but also gaps for other nations, including Iran and North Korea, and stateless groups such as the al-Qaida terrorist network.

McClellan said the president would announce the members of the commission and its timeline for completion later this week. The results of the panel’s work should be expected next year, a senior official said.

Vice President Cheney planned to be at a Senate Republicans’ policy luncheon on Tuesday, a weekly strategy session on Capitol Hill that he often attends, to hear lawmakers’ concerns about the intelligence commission among other issues, an administration official said.

The White House was leaning toward announcing the commission and its members on Wednesday when Bush gives a speech on terrorism at the Library of Congress.

With the election nine months away, the White House must strike a delicate balance in appointing commission members. The panel will need individuals who understand intelligence operations, but critics are sure to suggest former intelligence officials might not be objective about work done on their watch.

Appointees close to Bush might well bring Democratic complaints of partiality. But a truly independent commission could demand interviews and material that the White House is reluctant to provide. While the White House insists it has cooperated with the Sept. 11 commission’s request for access, the commission has criticized the administration for restricting its access to secret presidential intelligence briefings.