Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts is shocked – SHOCKED – at the effrontery of Democrats in insisting he follow through on promises to look at whether politics twisted Iraq war intelligence.
“It’s unprecedented. It’s a stunt,” fumed the Kansas Republican on Tuesday after Democrats reached into a bag of procedural tricks to force all hands into a secret two-hour session.
Still, the maneuver worked.
A bipartisan task force of six senators now will try to extract from the thicket of intelligence-committee secrecy a progress report on the politically charged “Phase II” probe into whether the White House manipulated intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.
“I deeply regret this has happened,” Roberts said Tuesday, according to a Congressional Quarterly transcript.
Well he might.
He’s been pinned to the wall and now has to account to the full Senate for why there’s been no apparent movement on Phase II since July 2004.
Back then, a bipartisan deal let a sanitized 511-page Phase I report come out before the presidential elections. That was supposed to lead to a real attempt to probe whether U.S. officials cherry-picked intelligence or pressured analysts to produce what they wanted before ordering an attack on Iraq.
Roberts even shook hands on this deal, pledging to the committee’s top Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, that he would make Phase II a “top priority.”
It was such a high priority that it languished in deepest obscurity for more than a year.
Meanwhile, Roberts poured cold water on the idea that it could yield anything new, eventually narrowing its scope to the laughable proposition that the investigation would be satisfied merely by comparing 500 statements from top officials to the contemporaneous intelligence.
Staff work on that aspect of the report was finished May 17, Roberts said Tuesday. So why all the fuss?
Why, indeed?
In fact, why, when I called Roberts’ office the week of May 23 seeking comment on the status of Phase II, did no one return my call? If it was all wrapped up, wouldn’t Roberts want to blow his committee’s horn?
Instead, not a peep.
Worse than not a peep. The public was left in the dark for months, and that obscurity only is deepening.
Porter Goss, a former congressman who now heads the CIA, even hesitated to share with his former colleagues the internal CIA report on what went wrong with pre-9/11 intelligence.
Eventually that CIA inspector general’s report went to Congress, but it’s never been made public.
What is the CIA hiding?
Roberts insists his committee already laid to rest any accusation of political manipulation and doesn’t need to revisit the matter.
That’s open to interpretation.
The unclassified sections of the Phase I report point to multiple cases of apparent pressure on intelligence analysts as well as gaping holes where further inquiry is warranted. They also suggest a political agenda – such as Roberts’ insistence in an “additional views” section, in which he was joined by only two of the committee’s other 16 senators, that Joe Wilson, the ex-U.S. ambassador the CIA sent to Niger to check out reports of Iraqi uranium shopping in 2002, never debunked the story and actually gave analysts “even more reason to believe that it may be true.”
This assertion requires several leaps of faith – not the least being that Wilson’s overall findings, that tight French hold over Niger’s uranium output mitigated substantial diversions, counted for nothing.
Democrats threw down a partisan hand with their Senate maneuver, but they’re not the only ones playing a dodgy game of cards.
Roberts’ stalls do no service to the American people, who rightly suspect a cover-up when they’re repeatedly denied the ability to learn how things went so badly wrong with U.S. intelligence on Iraq.
Elizabeth Sullivan is foreign affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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