NY Times: Initial intelligence report avoids focus on White House

"Under a deal struck between Republicans and Democrats, a Senate intelligence committee report that is highly critical of prewar intelligence on Iraq will sidestep the question of how the Bush administration used that information to make the case for war, congressional officials said Wednesday.
That politically explosive issue is to be the focus of a second stage of the Senate inquiry, to be completed later. But the initial report, to be released on Friday and approved by the panel in a unanimous vote, focuses on misjudgments by intelligence agencies, not the White House, in assessments about Iraq, illicit weapons and Al Qaeda that the Bush administration used as a rationale to war.
The effect may be to provide an opening for President George W. Bush and his allies to deflect responsibility for what appear to have been exaggerated prewar assessments about the threat posed by Iraq, by portraying them as the fault of the Central Intelligence Agency and its outgoing director, George Tenet, rather than of Bush and his top aides.
Still, Democrats will try to focus attention on the issue by releasing as many as a half-dozen "additional views" to supplement the bipartisan report.
"How the administration used the intelligence was very troubling," Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview this week. "They took a flawed set of intelligence reports and converted it into a rationale for going to war."
The plan to release the "Report on Pre-War Intelligence on Iraq" was announced on Wednesday by the committee after the CIA agreed that a large majority of the report could be made public, congressional officials said. . . ."