New York Times
December 3, 2006
Timing Set for Release of Iraq Panel’s Report
By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — The Iraq Study Group will present its report to President Bush and Congress, as well as to the public, at 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday.

The report will be available at that time for downloading from the Web site of the United States Institute of Peace, which has been coordinating the 10-member commission’s activities over the last eight months. The institute’s Web site is www.usip.org.

Mr. Bush has made clear that while he is eager to learn the panel’s recommendations, he will also give considerable weight to Iraq policy reviews being concluded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and by the National Security Council. Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, the outgoing chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said today that those reviews were expected to wind up in “seven to 10 days.”

Stephen J. Hadley, who heads the National Security Council, said today that Mr. Bush would seriously consider the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations, but that they would represent just “one input” into a process that will also consider the views of Congress, American military commanders in Iraq and the Iraqi government. Mr. Hadley has predicted an announcement of a new American direction in Iraq in “weeks, not months.”

But the eminence of the Iraq Study Group’s bipartisan membership — it is headed by James A. Baker III, who was secretary of state under Bush’s father, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana — and the tremendous publicity that will attend the release of its report, will make it difficult for the president to ignore its findings.

Besides Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton, the panel’s members include Lawrence S. Eagleburger, a former secretary of state; Vernon E. Jordan Jr., a prominent Washington lawyer and former director of the Urban League; Edwin Meese III, a former attorney general; Sandra Day O’Connor, a former United States Supreme Court justice; Leon E. Panetta, a former White House chief of staff; William J. Perry, former secretary of defense; Charles S. Robb, a former Democratic senator from Virginia; and Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming.