Harry Reid, stunt man.

Byline: The Register-Guard

When Democrats ambushed stunned Republicans with a little-used rule to force the Senate into closed session on Tuesday, it was a bald-faced, low-down, dirty stunt. And it succeeded brilliantly.

Which is too bad, in a way. The question of whether the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to mislead Congress into supporting the invasion of Iraq is gravely serious and shouldn't be cheapened by political grandstanding.

That said, Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid had a point: Playing by the normal rules wasn't working. The Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee was never keen to investigate the systemic failures that produced former CIA Director George Tenet's "slam dunk" case that Iraq was bristling with weapons of mass destruction.

When the Intelligence Committee was forced to launch a formal investigation after it became obvious that Saddam Hussein had zero WMDs, Republicans focused the probe on breakdowns within the intelligence community. The committee in July 2004 issued a decent bipartisan analysis of the groupthink, poor communication and exaggeration that prevented an accurate intelligence assessment of Saddam's weaponry.

The second phase of the Senate investigation was supposed to look at the Bush administration's use of intelligence and examine public statements made by key policymakers about the threat posed by Iraq. But in a sellout to political expediency, the Democrats agreed not to have the committee pursue the second phase until after the 2004 elections.

Guess what? Republicans won big in those elections. With the GOP's replenished political capital, Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, lacked a certain sense of urgency when it came to the second phase of the report.

Democrats, having hardly covered themselves in glory as critics of the Iraq war, saw the recent indictment of Vice President Dick Che- ney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, as an opportunity to redeem themselves and refocus attention on the Bush administration's case for war. It worked, but only for a couple of days.

President Bush yanked the spotlight off the Libby story with his nomination of Sam Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court. OK, Reid responded; it's time to invoke Standing Rule 21.

Under the arcane rule, which hasn't been used in 25 years, the Senate can be closed to the public without a vote so senators can discuss intelligence or classified information. Reid's call for a Rule 21 closure without consulting Majority Leader Bill Frist was a serious breach of decorum. Frist and Senate Republican leaders were pictures of red-faced fury as they spoke with TV reporters about Reid's gambit.

But it worked. Alito stories were pushed out of lead positions on evening newscasts and replaced with "Congress in Crisis" banners. More important, Reid strong-armed a commitment from Senate Republicans to have a report by Nov. 14 on when the second phase of the investigation will be completed.

The American people deserve a thorough, bipartisan analysis of the Bush administration's case to go to war. But before Democrats spend too much time congratulating themselves on the stunning success of their political chicanery, they need to remember how hypocritical it is to argue that the end justifies the means. That, in a nutshell, has been the Bush administration's revised rationale for invading Iraq ever since it lost the argument on weapons of mass destruction.