Should Cheney Be Next?

But the issue is not whether the White House influenced the intelligence assessments. The issue is whether the White House knowingly cherry-picked the intelligence to make a misleading case for war. And the evidence continues to mount that it did.

The White House-chartered Silberman-Robb commission did report that it found no overt signs of White House pressure on the intelligence community to change their intelligence findings. (See my March 31, 2005 and April 1, 2005 columns.)

But the commission overtly avoided the question of whether the findings were politicized: "There is a separate issue of how policymakers used the intelligence they were given and how they reflected it in their presentations to Congress and the public. That issue is not within our charter and we therefore did not consider it nor do we express a view on it."

Similarly, the Senate intelligence committee chose to put that issue off until after the election -- and it's still not clear how they intend to address it.

But how is it possible that neither investigation even alluded to the evidence that the White House cherry-picked and politicized the intelligence?

Blogger Josh Marshall called Drumheller and found out he was interviewed by the White House commission three times.

"Did he tell them everything he revealed on tonight's 60 Minutes segment. Absolutely.

"Drumheller was also interviewed twice by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Roberts Committee) but apparently only after they released their summer 2004 report.

"Now, quite a few of us have been arguing for almost two years now that those reports were fundamentally dishonest in the story they told about why we were so badly misled in the lead up to war. The fact that none of Drumheller's story managed to find its way into those reports, I think, speaks volumes about the agenda that the writers of those reports were pursuing."

Leak Watch

Walter Pincus writes in The Washington Post: "Key Democratic legislators yesterday joined Republicans in saying they do not condone the alleged leaking of classified information that led to last week's firing of a veteran CIA officer. But they questioned whether a double standard exists that lets the White House give reporters secretly declassified information for political purposes."

The Graph That Roared

It's often said that you never know where you're going to find a front-page story in The Washington Post. Well, here's a corollary: You never know where you're going to find the biggest news in a front-page story.

In R. Jeffrey Smith and Dafna Linzer's 's front-pager in Sunday's Post on the firing of the CIA officer, the biggest news arguably comes in the second-to-last paragraph: