Their own enemy

Senator Jay Rockefeller, the author of this enlightened document, apparently made an ass of himself on a television interview. All emphasis added by me.

WALLACE: Senator, you're quite right. You didn't get the Presidential Daily Brief or the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief. You got the National Intelligence Estimate. But the Silberman Commission, a Presidential commission that looked into this, did get copies of those briefs, and they say that they were, if anything, even more alarmist, even less nuanced than the intelligence you saw, and yet you, not the President, said that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat.

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: The Silberman Commission was absolutely prohibited by the President in his charge to them – he appointed them – from ever looking at the use of intelligence, whether it was misused, whether it was massaged to influence the American people to go along with a decision which he had long ago already decided to make.

WALLACE: But didn't they come to that conclusion which I just stated, that the Presidential Daily Brief was in fact more alarmist and less nuanced than the intelligence you saw?

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: I don't know, because I never get to see, nor does Pat, the Presidential Daily Brief. All I know is that we don't get the intelligence that they do. We are called the Senate Intelligence Committee. We get a lot more than the rest of the Senate, but it was incomplete as to what the President gets, and it was obviously entirely wrong, which raises the question, why was it wrong?

Sounds familiar. Wallace points out that all the evidence points towards the President's Daily Brief as having cast no more doubt on the subject of Iraq than the National Intelligence Estimate, to which Rockefeller replies "well, but the intelligence we saw turned out to be wrong, didn't it? And the only way that we could have missed the truth is if the President knew the real truth, and hid it from us!"

The interview continues, with hilarious results.

WALLACE: Can I just ask my question sir, and then you can answer as you choose. That report indicated there was an agreement – a disagreement among analysts about the nuclear program. The State Department had a lot more doubts than the CIA did about whether he was pursuing a nuclear program. You never mentioned those doubts. You came to the same conclusion the President did.

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Because that – first of all, that National Intelligence Estimate was not called for by the Administration. It was called for by former Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and Dick Durbin. We didn't receive it until just a couple of days before we voted. Then we had to go read it and compare it to everything else that we thought we'd learned about intelligence, and I did make that statement. And I did make that vote. But, Chris, the important thing is that when I started looking at the weapons of mass destruction intelligence along with Pat Roberts, I went down to the floor, and I said I made a mistake. I would have never voted yes if I knew what I know today.

WALLACE: But a lot of people – that's not the point of the investigation, Senator.

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Chris, there's always the same conversation. You know it was not the Congress that sent 135,000 or 150,000 troops.

WALLACE: But you voted, sir, and aren't you responsible for your vote?

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: No.

WALLACE: You're not?

No. Yes. Maybe. Could you revise your questions to fit more cleanly with my talking points? I guess the committee he sits on is about Intelligence in name only.

Interestingly, Wallace addresses a lot of the points made in the recent Washington Post article on this subject.