Investigations to nowhere: the Senate Intelligence Committee goes on and on, tediously, fruitlessly.(CAPITOL HILL II)

IT's probably safe to say that in October 2002, when she declared on the Senate floor that "intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton had no idea that statements like hers would one day be the subject of a full-scale Senate investigation. Nor could she have known that when she added a statement on terrorist connections--"[Saddam] has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members"--she made it even more likely that someday her fellow senators would be poring over intelligence documents, trying to determine whether her declaration was justified on the basis of the intelligence available at the time of the Iraq War Senate debate.

And yet that is precisely what has happened. At this moment, the Senate Intelligence Committee is engaged in a protracted investigation of the public statements of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, top administration officials, lawmakers in the House and Senate, and even officials of previous administrations to determine whether they exaggerated, cherry-picked, misrepresented, or otherwise manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the war.

It's not going well. In fact, the "statements investigation" is the main roadblock to completion of what is called "Phase Two" of the committee's probe of pre-war intelligence. A look at its history is a case study in how the rationale for the war in Iraq has retroactively become hopelessly politicized--and why that is unlikely to change anytime soon.

As originally conceived in 2003, the committee's investigation was to focus on what went wrong with intelligence about Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction. But from the beginning Democrats also wanted to investigate the Bush administration's use of the intelligence as it made the case for war. Most Republicans had no desire to go in that direction--they could see the whole thing turning into a political argument without end. Ultimately, a deal was struck. The committee would go ahead immediately with the basic intelligence investigation--dubbed Phase One--before examining the use of that intelligence in Phase Two.

Phase One was finished and the committee's report released in July 2004. To no one's surprise, it concluded that key intelligence judgments in the pre-war National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting." But it found "no evidence" that any of those mistakes were the result of political pressure from President Bush or members of his administration.

That left Democrats with a problem: The report did nothing to further the "Bush lied" theme that they hoped might help the party in the 2004 election. So Democrats pressed on for Phase Two. "I think people want their leaders to give them straight, unvarnished statements without exaggeration," Sen. Carl Levin, the number-two Democrat on the committee, told Roll Call in July 2004. "So if people believe that the administration or the president exaggerated or embellished intelligence, I think that there will be some people [who] would say that is a factor in their vote."

But, owing to the volume of the material involved, Phase Two couldn't be done quickly, and Republicans weren't keen to make it a priority. After the election, it progressed so slowly that Democrats shut down the Senate in November 2005 to protest the lack of progress. After that, things got moving.