To answer the charges that Bush "deliberately misled" the country on WMD, the White House is arguing that most Democrats—and most U.N. officials and European intelligence agencies—thought Saddam had WMD, too. Bush aides argue that Democrats saw the same intel and came to the same conclusions Bush did (an assertion Democrats hotly dispute).

One Democrat who is hotly disputing that assertion is ex-Senator Bob Graham, formerly a big name on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Writing in high dudgeon, he penned his own response in the Washington Post—

The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.

The president has undermined trust. No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity. Caveat emptor has become the word. Every member of Congress is on his or her own to determine the truth.

Graham then sets to explaining his role leading up to the vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq. He begins—

As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, I probably had as much access to the intelligence on which the war was predicated as any other member of Congress.

As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, you would hope so. But that's an odd way of describing the situation. Graham in fact had more access to intelligence than most other members of Congress.

At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein's capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons.1 We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.

There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.

Graham also learned that the CIA information had not been independently verified by a disinterested party.

Now what follows is a terrible indictment, first, of the process. And then it must be said that Senator Graham was at best a wimp who obviously placed career over country—

The American people needed to know these reservations,2 and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as "If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year," underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.

From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth.

On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.

Something is terribly wrong here. Bob Graham was a chief intelligence watchdog not only for the American people but for the Senate itself. I realize that by law he was not permitted to reveal the classified sections of the report. But he should have insisted that the contrary views presented by the Departments of State and Energy be made public. (They were not based upon information provided by operatives. They were based upon technical assessments.) Failing that, he should have gone public with the information.

Graham, as a Senator, could not even have been indicted for revealing classified information so long as he presented the information on the Senate floor. The worst that could have ensued is that he would have been stripped of his assignment on the Intelligence Committee. But if an open debate followed after he made the information public, that is unlikely.3

But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the public may not reasonably expect from a U.S. Senator the same level of integrity that one might find in, say, a Chinese translator or a State Department analyst. Then the Senators themselves, and most especially those of the same party, should make clear to their appointees on the Intelligence Committee that they wish to be informed of any and all nefarious schemes to draw the country into war—and let the classification be damned.

Is that really too much for the public to ask?

Senator Graham does not succeed in exonerating his fellow Senators, Democrat or Republican, from their oversight responsibilities, but in the effort he presents a terrible indictment of himself.