[tag]Senate Intelligence Committee[/tag] Chairman [tag]Pat Roberts[/tag] (R-Kan.) has been playing a very annoying game for an embarrassingly long time. Initially, the committee was prepared to release a comprehensive report on pre-[tag]war[/tag] [tag]intelligence[/tag], what it said, and how it was handled. Then Roberts split the report in two — one on how wrong the intelligence was (released before the 2004 presidential election) and another on how the White House used/misused the available information (released after the 2004 presidential election).
A year ago, Roberts, whose reputation as a partisan hack is well deserved, said he’d put off the “[tag]Phase Two[/tag]” indefinitely. Nearly nine months ago, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid shut down the Senate until Senate Republicans committed to wrapping up the investigation and producing the final report.
Roberts, however, managed to stall his way past one election, and now he’s going for two.
The Republican-led committee, which agreed in February 2004 to write the report, has yet to complete its work. Just two of five planned sections of the committee’s findings are fully drafted and ready to be voted on by members, according to Democratic and Republican staffers. Committee sources involved with the report, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they are working hard to complete it. But disputing Roberts, they said they had started almost from scratch in November after Democrats staged their protest.
Roberts spokeswoman Sarah Ross Little said the slow pace is partially the result of Roberts’s desire to give members a chance for input. She said Roberts will make public the two completed sections “when they are approved by the committee and have been declassified,” rather than wait for the other three to be done, as well.
Roberts said he’d try to have Phase Two available to the public before the 2004 election. He lied. Roberts then gave his word earlier this year, in writing, that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee would have a draft report on controversial “public statements” from administration officials by April 5. He lied about that too.
Let’s not lose sight of why this is so significant.
The report that Roberts has sat on for several years now is the Senate Intelligence Committee’s official conclusion about manipulation of intelligence in advance of a war. This is hardly a trivial concern — it examines whether the Bush administration knowingly lied its way into a costly and disastrous war.
To this day, the White House line is that Congress saw the same intelligence the president did, and that there was a systemic breakdown that led to unreliable information. It’s not Bush’s fault, the argument goes, that he relied on intelligence that turned out to be flawed.
But we’ve seen repeatedly just how absurd this argument is. Not only did the president have access to far more information, we’ve also since learned about the insights from people like veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller, who explained in no uncertain terms that the intelligence community gave the White House plenty of reliable intelligence about Iraq before the war, but the Bush gang blew it off because they didn’t want to hear it. Drumheller made clear that the White House was told directly that there were no WMDs, but Bush had already decided to go to war and needed information “to fit into the policy.” In case anyone needed more evidence about cherry-picked intelligence, Drumheller gift wrapped it.
But when it comes time for Pat Roberts and the Senate Intelligence Committee to do its duty and report on how intelligence was mishandled, we see broken promises and one stalling tactic after another. The tactics would be comical if they weren’t so sad.