Over the weekend, Senate Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) embarrassed himself — again — when dealing with protection of classified materials. This time, the subject was Valerie Plame’s status as an undercover agent.
“There’s a five-year period, OK? And whether or not that five-year period had been reached or not is still questionable. And I must say from a common sense standpoint, driving back and forth to work to the CIA headquarters, I don’t know if that really qualifies as being, you know, covert.”
Now, the reality-based community knows this is absurd, and it has been since the claim made it into GOP talking points a couple of weeks ago. To his credit, former CIA agent Larry Johnson took the time to explain — again — why Roberts is completely wrong. But what troubles me is the fact that this is the latest in a series of intelligence-related embarrassments for the man who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.
* In October 2003, Roberts insisted there was no need for his committee to hold a hearing into the leaking of an undercover CIA agent’s identity because, as he put it at the time, “This is an old story.” Roberts made the comment less than five days after the White House was notified about a criminal probe being launched by the Justice Department.
* In January 2004, Roberts told a national television audience that Saddam Hussein blocked United Nations weapons inspectors from entering Iraq before we launched an invasion. Roberts told CNN, “If in fact [Saddam] didn’t have [WMD], why on earth didn’t he let the U.N. inspectors in and avoid the war?” In reality, Hussein did allow inspectors in, but we launched the war anyway. It seems like the kind of detail the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee might remember — if he was in any way competent.
* In March 2005, Roberts announced that, despite promises to the contrary, he would not allow his committee to prepare a report explaining how the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence on Iraq before the war began. Roberts did allow a report to move forward on how the intelligence community misjudged the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and swore that the second half of the project — addressing the administration’s faults — would be forthcoming. As the presidential election drew closer, Roberts flip-flopped and said that would no longer happen.
Wait, it gets worse.
* Just today we learned that Roberts is now ready to hold a Plame-related hearing, but only into the spy agencies’ use of cover to protect the identities of intelligence officers. Roberts won’t hold hearings looking into the White House leaking information about undercover agents, but he will hold hearings questioning whether the CIA is doing enough to protect agents’ identities. As Josh Marshall put it, the point of the new hearings is to allow Roberts to ask whether Plame was “covert enough.”
Roberts has, slowly but surely, become a hack of the worst kind. If he were some clown on Fox News it’d be a shame, but he’s the chairman of Senate Select Intelligence Committee.
Josh concluded that Roberts is “a shame to his office.” Given what we’ve seen the past couple of years, it’s the only conclusion one can draw.