More on Senate Intelligence Investigation

When it comes to the many shennigans of Bush and Cheney, it appears we're still a ways from reaching the bottom of the barrel in terms of information on what those two have been up to in the last four years. Many of us are getting so used to information being dumped on the public on Friday afternoons by people in Washington in the hopes the public and news networks won't notice that Friday is a little like a birthday party: lots of presents and lots of surprises (read: information validating what we already know). Billmon, the famous but anonymous blog reporter has read the reports and has a long post; here's two paragraphs from the opening part:

The Intelligence Committee -- or, as I often call it, the Whitewash Committee -- was delivering the first results of the long-promised "Phase II" of its investigation into the Iraq WMD fiasco. Since Phase I, released in the campaign summer of 2004, was widely seen as a blatant attempt to pin the blame on the intelligence community for the mind-boggling string of lies told by Cheney administration officials in the runup to the invasion, I was curious to see if Phase II is giving us more of the same.

The short, if ambiguous, answer is that it does and it doesn't. As in Phase I, the committee's staff investigation appears to have been carefully designed to avoid uncovering any of the real scandals -- such as the neocon-controlled bureaucratic pipeline that fed bits of raw intelligence data, wild rumors and quasi-insane conspiracy theories directly to the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the White House propanganda shop.

The reports are not as damaging to Cheney and Bush as they might be if the full truth had been told but it looks like they're pretty damaging as it it. And perhaps, I say perhaps, a number of Republicans are finally beginning to recognize the enormous damage Bush and Cheney are doing to the nation and the further damage the two will continue to do if they are not checked.