In February 2004, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSCI) announced that it had unanimously agreed to expand its investigation of prewar Iraq intelligence from focus on intelligence community blunders and into the more controversial area of “whether intelligence was exaggerated or misused” by U.S. government officials. The committee's ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller, struck the agreement with Chairman Pat Roberts -- provided, Roberts insisted, that the probe into policy-makers' activities wait until after the presidential election.

It's now more than a year later, and Rockefeller is still waiting -- the Phase II report has yet to appear. What happened? And why isn't Rockefeller making more of a fuss?

It's no secret that some of the more dubious intelligence cited by the Bush administration to justify its invasion of Iraq ran through Italy. The most infamous case is that of the forged "uranium from Niger" memos that ultimately became a key basis for the administration's mistaken claims that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. A 1998 Italian newspaper report on a purported meeting between an emissary of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden circulated into U.S. intelligence as a key shred of evidence of prewar cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda, since discredited by the September 11 commission.