Ms. Jane Harman is no wacky conspiracy theorist; she is level-headed, smart, and responsible to her position in Congress, her constituents and her country. When she starts asking these hard but obvious questions, the administration would be wise to listen and answer, not sic their usual attack teams on her. Before coming to China, I lived in Los Angeles for a decade; I have some knowledge of Ms. Harman. I really don't think Shrub & Twigs want to tangle with her. While they probably aren't seriously counting on carrying California come November, they still would like not to be embarrassed there. She can do that to Dubya any day of the week and twice on Sunday, I don't care if he goes to breakfast prayer meeting, Sunday morning Bible school and evening services to boot.
Mr. Bush should use his State of the Union address on Tuesday "to acknowledge the problems and outline specific steps to fix them," Representative Jane Harman of California will say in a speech in Los Angeles, according to an advance text provided by her office.
But Ms. Harman, whose position on the intelligence committee gives her access to highly classified intelligence briefings, says in the advance text of her speech that the intelligence agencies "connected the dots to the wrong conclusions."
The planned criticism by Ms. Harman, in a speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, is expected to be the sharpest yet from a leader of the panel that oversees the Central Intelligence Agency. It comes a year after Mr. Bush devoted much of his State of the Union address in 2003 to portray what he called "a serious and mounting threat to our country" posed by Iraq's possession of illicit weapons.
"If our intelligence products had been better, I believe many policy makers, including me, would have had a far clearer picture of the sketchiness of our sources on Iraq's W.M.D. programs, and our lack of certainty about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities," the speech reads, using an abbreviation for the phrase "weapons of mass destruction." ...
The Harman speech does say that "there were good reasons to support regime change in Iraq" and notes that Iraq had repeatedly violated United Nations resolutions by failing to prove after the Persian Gulf war of 1991 that it had dismantled the illicit weapons and weapons programs that were discovered to be part of its arsenal at that time.
There is a great deal more in this article you should read, it's inThe New York Times...
