Republican Albatross

Laura Rozen calls out Pat Roberts and she tells quite a tale.

Still, I think it’s important to remember that we are pursuing phase II of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation for purely political purposes. We will get nothing substantive out of it as long as Senator Pat Roberts is the Chairman.

In Phase I you can see that whoever actually wrote the thing for the Republicans is quite skilled with language (perhaps they hired the romance novelist who penned the Starr report). In this case, it wasn’t bodice ripping sexual adventure, it was a masterful work of subliminal innuendo. The Democrats were either too lazy or too weak to fight this word for the word they way they should have done. Without the underlying information on which the conclusions were based, there is no way to understand what the hell really went on.

This is from the main body of the report, not the separate Hatch, Bond, Roberts addendum hatchet job:

( )Some CPD officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador’s wife “offered up his name” and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador’s wife says, “my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” This was just one day before CPD sent a cable DELETED requesting concurrence with CPD’s idea to send the former ambassador to Niger and requesting any additional information from the foreign government service on their uranium reports. The former ambassador’s wife told Committee staff that when CPD decided it would like to send the former ambassador to Niger, she approached her husband on behalf of the CIA and told him “there’s this crazy report” on a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.

This sounds innocuous. However, when you read the report carefully you realize the only time that any person is directly quoted it’s done to create a certain impression. In that paragraph we see that Wilson “offered up” her husband to investigate a “crazy report.” This shows that she has an agenda. Here’s another example:

An INR analyst’s notes indicate that the meeting was “apparently convened by [the former ambassador’s] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue.” The former ambassador’s wife told Committee staff that she only attended the meeting to introduce her husband and left after about three minutes.

Notice they don’t quote Valerie Wilson there, only the INR analyst. They do not reveal what she said about the “idea to dispatch him” in this passage, but leave it hanging there, unrefuted. There is plenty of information in the report itself and elsewhere from which to support a different view of events, but the report is subtly slanted throughout to give the impression that Plame sent her husband to Niger to knock down a claim that didn’t fit with her pre-conceived beliefs. (Of course, even if that were true, she would have been right. The Iraq Survey Group report put that one to bed.)

It happens throughout the otherwise rather dry, difficult report. By using selective quotes to promote a certain point of view while dissents are buried in expository language, they cleverly give weight to their conclusions while pretending to be even-handed. We can expect more of this for Phase II. (I have little faith that Jay Rockefeller can deal with this any more effectively now than he did before.)

Pat Roberts is the worst possible choice to be the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He is a partisan first and last. His predecessor, Richard Shelby of Alabama was no moderate (and he has his own problems with disseminating classified information) but he operated independently of the White House and took his job seriously. In combination with Bob Graham on the Democratic side, they were able to maintain at least some bi-partisan integrity. There is no integrity on the Republican side of the Intelligence Committee at present.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t press for the second phase of the investigation and more. We are about to go into an election year in which it may be possible to take control of the congress if we play our cards right. A huge part of that is laying this cover-up at the feet of these congressional enablers as much as the White House. They have been covering for the Dick Cheney show for years now and it’s time for the public to hold them responsible.

Here’s an early example of Roberts doing a bang up job of congressional oversight, from March of 2003:

Sarah Ross, a spokeswoman for Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts, said the committee will look into the forgery, but Roberts believes it is inappropriate for the FBI to investigate at this point.

The documents indicated that Iraq tried to by uranium from Niger, the West African nation that is the third-largest producer of mined uranium, Niger’s largest export. The documents had been provided to U.S. officials by a third country, which has not been identified.

A U.S. government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was unclear who first created the documents. The official said American suspicions remain about an Iraq-Niger uranium connection because of other, still-credible evidence that the official refused to specify.

In December, the State Department used the information to support its case that Iraq was lying about its weapons programs. But on March 7, Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents were forgeries.

Rockefeller said U.S. worries about Iraqi nuclear weapons were not based primarily on the documents, but “there is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.”

Then in November of 2003, look how they handled reports that the Democrats wanted to investigate how the White House used the intelligence. Frist had one of his patented hissy fits:

Angry about a leaked Democratic memo, the Republican leadership of the Senate yesterday took the unusual step of canceling all business of the committee investigating prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) called on the author of the memo — which laid out a possible Democratic strategy to extend the investigation to include the White House and executive branch — to “identify himself or herself . . . disavow this partisan attack in its entirety” and deliver “a personal apology” to Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence.

Only if those steps are taken, Frist said, “will it be possible for the committee to resume its work in an effective and bipartisan manner — a manner deserving of the confidence of other members of the Senate and the executive branch.”

Roberts followed Frist on the floor and said that unless the Democratic members “properly” address the issue, “I am afraid that it will be impossible to return to ‘business as usual’ in the committee.”

A committee meeting scheduled for yesterday was canceled, and none has been scheduled for next week, according to a senior committee staff member.

I would suggest that we use their own language against them instead of against ourselves, for once. Who are the real spineless politicians in Washington, after all? Is it the opposition Democrats who flailed unsuccessfully at a president who says that he’d prefer to be a dictator? Or are the GOP Senators and Congressmen who have spent the last five years as servile yes men and women to every single insane thing the president asked of them the real wimps in all this?

They have covered and excused and enabled and supported President Bush and Vice President Cheney no matter what cockamamie acheme they came up with at the expense of their duty as an equal branch of government. What kind of mealy-mouthed little bed-wetters are these Republicans who stood by while this president took this country down the path to perdition.

George W. Bush would be nothing today if it weren’t for the unified unquestioning support of the GOP congress of the United States. We need to make sure that he’s hung like a dead soaring eagle around the necks of every single Republican running for office next year. It isn’t just Codpiece and his mad dog Cheney. It’s the legislative branch who checked their consciences and their responsibilities at the doors to become brown-nosing sycophants for the most incompetent, radical, corrupt administration in history. It’s their Party and they can cry if they want to —- but it won’t do any good.

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