Reports of various inquiries here, in Great Britian, and in Australia have one common and overriding message: the intelligence delivered to the governments who enjoined in the Coalition of the Willing was the uniformly poor result of groupthink. Indeed, the various committee findings have been reported widely and loudly by the mainstream media, while there has been precious little or no questioning of what these reports failed to investigate or willfully chose to ignore. Further damning of the media coverage of these reports should also come from their own apparent institutional amnesia.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's report roundly criticised the CIA for its mischaracterisation the intelligence on WMDs, Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, and a host of other evidence presented in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE).

The Butler Inquiry focused on the Blair government's assertions that Iraq had sought yellow cake uranium from Niger, a claim infamously used by Bush in the now ravaged State of the Union address of 2003. Blair's adsurd claim that Iraq could deliver munitions to British soil within 45 minutes was also under investigation, if such a term might apply to the Butler panel's activities.

The mainstream press happily shouted these findings from the headlines. The common theme presented was borne by the phrase "intelligence failures." The implication: vindication of Bush's and Blair's actions was absolute; they had been abused either by the intelligence community's poor work, hidden agenda, or possibly both. Of course, no explanation as to why the intelligence community would have some need to invade Iraq is ever presented. Meanwhile, those with motive have been fawned over as merely dupes who fell prey to their own mendacious agencies.

While dissent on these findings can be found elsewhere in the media, it is certainly not apparent in the mainstream. Displaying their usual lack of historical reference, media reports of these inquiries focused solely on the reports themselves, with barely a mention of how contradictory the findings were to the known chronicle of those administration officials now apparently exonerated by the investigations.

For instance, the Senate report was widely quoted as claiming that the committee had found no evidence of pressure on intelligence analysts or other staff by administration officials. This is an apparently strong statement disculpating the White House of behaviour of which it has been accused for quite some time. In fact, it is not a strong statement of this at all. The reality is that it says almost nothing, given that the committee openly and explicitly stated that it had not investigated the White House's role in the production of any Iraq intelligence. The mainstream media busily recited the committee's words while ignoring well-reported stories of Dick Cheney's frequent and unprecedented visits to the CIA. No mention of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith's operations in the then-freshly minted Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon is even hinted. The OSP was an operation specifically designed to second-guess the CIA and, in some cases, override the CIA's more cautionary reports. This shouldn't surprise. Brand new evidence that the White House is still engaging in this sort of behaviour is occurring: the raw NEI carries a host of caveats. The one released to the public contains no evidence of doubt about the veracity of some of the NIE's contents. What also seems to have been lost in the media's mind is the nearly constant WMD chant coming variously from Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell since long before the NIE even existed. This overt brow-beating is well characterised by Cheney's unfounded assertion that "[s]imply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." That declaration was made in August, 2002, three months before the NIE was prepared. Indeed, this was two months before the CIA had even begun compilation of the NIE.

A host of former Bush administration officials -- Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neil to name two of the more prominent figures -- have come forth to reveal that the White House was solely focused on an invasion of Iraq shortly after 9/11. Though the media appears complicit with these so-called investigations, it is perhaps more indicative of the mainstream's need and desire to exculpate itself of the woeful charges that they were unwilling to challenge the White House stance. They can view the reports as an absolution, not only of White House conduct, but of their own ebbing abilities.

Quite apart from the inefficacy of the mainstream media in questioning the party line, a far more sinister posture has been assumed by the Republican party as it, once again, displays its maladroit agenda to the American public and the world. Not only had the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence committee refused to investigate White House involvement in intensifying intelligence reports when such activity is well known, it brazenly declared its refusal to do so, fully expecting this not to be a matter of concern. Statements by committee chair Roberts that such an investigation will occur, but that no report of such an inquiry will be published before the election cannot possibly be consoling to anyone seeking the truth in this immensely serious matter.

Of course, a disturbing reproduction of the US model is developing across the pond, where Butler's inquiry revealed nothing of the Blair cabinet's pursuit of an acceptable dossier despite the well-publicized statements of former UN weapons inspector David Kelly. Blair has continually trumpeted his ignorance of most everything, while MI6 has been declared by both the Hutton and Butler inquiries to be at least as incompetent as the CIA -- even though MI6 had recused itself from involvement with some of the more outlandish "evidence" in Blair's dossier.

That the British and American investigations into the intelligence fiasco have resulted in nearly identical reports should not surprise anyone, and there is really only one notable difference in the conduct of these putative probes. The political partisanship of the US House and Senate committees is clear and present. The motives of the various British investigations in clearing, or trying to clear, Blair and his cabinet are far more recondite. An air of unctous civility pervades as though the Lords would just rather have all this dreadful business done with, blame the help, and get on with tea. Of course, the independant investigations had to result in exactly the same conclusions in order to preserve the veneer of administration innocence.

The Republican Congressional majority will never fault the White House, despite all the sworn testimony that the administration knew exactly what it was doing, so a certain consistancy had to be maintained: both governments were abused by faulty intelligence gathering. Since Bush had cited the "British government" as his source for the Iraq uranium claim, any inquiry which would expose the Blair cabinet as the real culprit would necessarily indicate that, rather than being the tried and true ally, Tony Blair's government was a perfidious traitor. This would clearly be an unacceptable outcome of these investigations, to say the least.

With the Bush administration now shrouded in 511 opaque, grandiloquent pages, the Repubican ethos is clearly delineated: win, never admit mistakes, and arrange things thusly. To Republicans, though, winning means something entirely different than what it might to most. A win for Republicans is simple and terrifying: get what you want. No matter how grand or petty, no matter what the cost. It is a win for Republicans and no one else. This is a shameful and treacherous posture to assume in the world. It can be observed playing out in Iraq today.