I was pleased to see this morning that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) joined with the rest of the rational world in arguing that an independent commission is needed to launch a full-scale investigation into the intelligence failures surrounding the lead up to war in Iraq.
“I am absolutely convinced that one is necessary,” McCain said, “because this is a very serious issue and we need to not only know what happened, but know what steps are necessary to prevent the United States from ever being misinformed again.”
Sounds reasonable, right? David Kay, the administration’s hand-picked weapons inspector, now believes Iraq didn’t have WMD and that the intelligence was completely wrong. Wouldn’t it be valuable to know how and why this happened? Shouldn’t we know for sure if the administration misused the intelligence to “hype” the need for war?
The White House and their congressional GOP allies seem to think these questions are, of course, entirely inappropriate. The Republican consensus seems to be a commitment to an investigation led by the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.).
There’s only one real problem with that approach: We have every reason to question Roberts’ reliability.
As The New Republic’s Michael Crowley and Spencer Ackerman wrote this week, Roberts is “determined to protect the White House from anything but low-key, secret questioning.”
Last summer, Roberts was “receptive” to the idea of joint open hearings into intelligence failures. The next day, Senate Republicans met with Dick Cheney and Roberts reversed course, saying talk of a Senate investigation was “premature.”
And, as the TNR article explained, Roberts’ work so far has been designed to sidestep a substantive, bi-partisan investigation.
Roberts has created four separate areas of inquiry into possible failures of Iraq intelligence: WMD, Al Qaeda links, human rights, and regional threat. The latter two, of course, are not matters of public dispute — and, not coincidentally, are the two topics Roberts has allowed Democratic staffers to oversee. The first two — politically explosive — areas are being managed by GOP staffers. The team investigating WMD issues includes three Republican aides and just one Democrat. Such is Roberts’s idea of a “bipartisan” effort. What’s more, at least two of the committee’s GOP staffers are former officials at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, a focal point of the current controversy, creating a potential conflict of interest if they’re called upon to investigate their own past analyses or those of former colleagues.
Roberts, however, doesn’t seem particularly interested in a dispassionate analysis of how the administration developed its claims about Iraq’s weapons programs. In fact, the worse the White House’s use of prewar intelligence looks, the more Roberts defends it.
And let’s not forget that Roberts was on CNN this past weekend, wondering aloud “why on earth [Hussein didn’t] let the U.N. inspectors in and avoid the war.” Since Hussein did let U.N. inspectors in, this was a bizarre remark for the chariman of the Senate Intelligence Committee to make.
As Joe Conason put it, “Now Americans are supposed to entrust Roberts with determining how and why we were misled to war. We are asked to accept his judgment about the comparative culpability of the CIA, the White House, and the highest officials of the Bush administration. That would be easier if he weren’t a pliable partisan hack whose tether to reality seems rather badly frayed.”