Senate Committee Left White House "Marketing" Group Out Of Iraq Intel Report

The Washington Post's Walter Pincus points out that the Senate committee that released this report last week on pre-war intelligence didn't investigate the "marketing" efforts of the White House Iraq Group to push the nation towards war in Iraq.

There is an important line in last week's Senate intelligence committee report on the Bush administration's prewar exaggerations of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. It says that the panel did not review "less formal communications between intelligence agencies and other parts of the Executive Branch."

More important, there was no effort to obtain White House records or interview President Bush, Vice President Cheney or other administration officials whose speeches were analyzed because, the report says, such steps were considered beyond the scope of the report.

One obvious target for such an expanded inquiry would have been the records of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a group set up in August 2002 by then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.