.Roberts Disputes Claims of Cover-Up on Iraq Intelligence Report
Aug. 2 (Bloomberg) -- On Nov. 1, the U.S. Senate abruptly ejected all tourists from the gallery, dimmed the lights and shut its doors for a highly unusual ``closed session'' called by Democratic leaders.
Their goal: to embarrass the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts of Kansas, into delivering on promises to lead a full ``Phase II'' investigation of the administration's handling of the intelligence -- some of it inaccurate -- that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Nine months later, they are still waiting. The inaction, said Democratic lawmakers, former administration officials and intelligence analysts, is one example of Roberts's unqualified support for the Bush administration that goes beyond the Iraq probe to include quashing inquiries into the torture of prisoners and the monitoring of domestic phone calls and e-mails.
``I'm the bad guy; I'm the Darth Vader,'' Roberts, 70, said in an interview a few weeks ago. He went on to deny that he had covered up or concealed anything.
Critics say Roberts has been doing the administration's bidding. ``There is no question in my mind that he is delaying the Phase II probe for political reasons,'' said Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, referring to a report that will follow up on an earlier probe of intelligence collection errors by examining whether pre- war administration statements about Iraq accurately reflected the available intelligence.
Calling the Shots
Democratic lawmakers such as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada have suggested that Roberts is delaying the report until after the November midterm elections to protect the administration from embarrassing disclosures. ``The only conclusion to draw is that the investigation is too embarrassing for Republicans to make public before the elections,'' Reid said on the Senate floor this week.
Reid also suggested earlier this year that Vice President Dick Cheney was really calling the shots. ``I believe that the Intelligence Committee is not being run by Senator Roberts; it's being run by the vice president,'' Reid said.
Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride called that ``an absurd assertion.'' She it would be ``common'' for Cheney to speak with the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees as part of the necessary communication between the executive and legislative branches of government.
Former Defense Department and intelligence officials said a thorough probe would show that President George W. Bush and his administration purposely exaggerated claims about Iraq's purported weapons arsenal.
``The president wanted a war, the administration wanted a war,'' said retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia office in 2002 and 2003. ``Lies were told.''
Democratic Maneuvering
Roberts dismissed the criticism, saying that he has tried to do his job impartially and that the delays were caused by Democratic maneuvering. He cited a meeting scheduled for July 13 to discuss the process for releasing the Phase II report that had to be postponed because of Democratic demands for more than two dozen changes to the conclusions.
``Every time we get to a situation where you think we can make some progress, I may be first and 20 on the goal line, and all of a sudden I'm first and 40,'' he said. ``I am getting more than a little tired of getting blamed.''
A Roberts spokeswoman, Sarah Little, said the committee is ``nearing completion'' on two parts of the five-section Phase II report: one on pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and another on the reliance of the U.S. intelligence community on information provided by foes of Saddam Hussein, some of which proved to be false.
No Timetable
She wouldn't provide a timetable for the release of the rest of Phase II, which is to focus on how the administration used the intelligence to build a case for the war.
Senator Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said the chairman has ``been very open at looking back and learning lessons'' about intelligence failures.
Roberts's critics said Democratic political maneuvering can't explain why his committee hasn't released Phase II after producing a widely praised Phase I investigation in July 2004 that focused on mistakes in pre-war intelligence collection and analysis.
Roberts said in the July 12 interview that he wanted to get key parts of the committee's probe declassified and released before the August recess -- though he postponed a committee vote after Democrats sought revisions to the report.
Promise and Delay
A similar pattern of promise and delay has affected the investigation almost since it was first launched in February 2004, 11 months after the invasion of Iraq.
After calling the report ``one of my top priorities'' in July 2004, Roberts in March 2005 played down the report's significance and echoed the administration's defense. ``The bottom line is, they believed the intelligence and the intelligence was wrong,'' Roberts said.
Roberts also praised the pre-war intelligence report of a commission chaired by former Senator Charles Robb of Virginia and federal appellate judge Laurence Silberman -- and called further investigation ``a monumental waste of time.''
In April 2005, Roberts said he would release the report's findings publicly. Three months later, he reconsidered that decision in a letter to Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat.
Paul Pillar, who served as the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and is a critic of the Bush administration's use of intelligence, said he was interviewed twice by Roberts' staffers. In the second meeting, in late 2005, he said, ``we covered almost exactly the same ground we covered before.''
Secret Programs
Roberts also has been reluctant to investigate controversial secret programs the administration created in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
He at first said he would consider probing a National Security Agency program to eavesdrop on conversations between U.S. residents and suspected terrorists overseas without court approval, then marshaled a majority of committee members to reject any investigation. He has said repeatedly the program is necessary for national security and that its disclosure by the news media has damaged its effectiveness.
At Cheney's behest, Roberts at first limited oversight of the NSA eavesdropping to a subgroup of the committee. He later reversed himself in the face of dissatisfaction within the panel.
NSA and Abu Ghraib
Roberts has left oversight of the NSA program and the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, which may have involved Central Intelligence Agency employees, mostly to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Armed Services Committee. He resisted Democratic pressure to probe CIA interrogation techniques and the agency's reputed network of secret overseas prisons for terrorist suspects.
Roberts hasn't always marched in lockstep with the administration. In 2004, he split with Bush by introducing legislation to overhaul the U.S. intelligence operations. The administration favored a less drastic alternative.
Roberts said his committee is doing a better job of oversight now than it did before Sept. 11, 2001. He said panel members ask CIA employees ``what do you know, what don't you know and what do you think?''
Loch Johnson, a political scientist at the University of Georgia in Athens who has written about the CIA, said Roberts' tenure has been a ``mixed picture.'' Johnson praised the Phase I report while criticizing Roberts for failing to complete the second phase or examine ``the questions of possible White House spinning and cherry-picking of intelligence.''
Roberts' reluctance to release that report is politically motivated, Johnson said: ``I have a feeling that Roberts has been told by the White House to lay off, and that is what he has done.''
Bloomberg
Their goal: to embarrass the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts of Kansas, into delivering on promises to lead a full ``Phase II'' investigation of the administration's handling of the intelligence -- some of it inaccurate -- that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Nine months later, they are still waiting. The inaction, said Democratic lawmakers, former administration officials and intelligence analysts, is one example of Roberts's unqualified support for the Bush administration that goes beyond the Iraq probe to include quashing inquiries into the torture of prisoners and the monitoring of domestic phone calls and e-mails.
``I'm the bad guy; I'm the Darth Vader,'' Roberts, 70, said in an interview a few weeks ago. He went on to deny that he had covered up or concealed anything.
Critics say Roberts has been doing the administration's bidding. ``There is no question in my mind that he is delaying the Phase II probe for political reasons,'' said Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, referring to a report that will follow up on an earlier probe of intelligence collection errors by examining whether pre- war administration statements about Iraq accurately reflected the available intelligence.
Calling the Shots
Democratic lawmakers such as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada have suggested that Roberts is delaying the report until after the November midterm elections to protect the administration from embarrassing disclosures. ``The only conclusion to draw is that the investigation is too embarrassing for Republicans to make public before the elections,'' Reid said on the Senate floor this week.
Reid also suggested earlier this year that Vice President Dick Cheney was really calling the shots. ``I believe that the Intelligence Committee is not being run by Senator Roberts; it's being run by the vice president,'' Reid said.
Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride called that ``an absurd assertion.'' She it would be ``common'' for Cheney to speak with the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees as part of the necessary communication between the executive and legislative branches of government.
Former Defense Department and intelligence officials said a thorough probe would show that President George W. Bush and his administration purposely exaggerated claims about Iraq's purported weapons arsenal.
``The president wanted a war, the administration wanted a war,'' said retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia office in 2002 and 2003. ``Lies were told.''
Democratic Maneuvering
Roberts dismissed the criticism, saying that he has tried to do his job impartially and that the delays were caused by Democratic maneuvering. He cited a meeting scheduled for July 13 to discuss the process for releasing the Phase II report that had to be postponed because of Democratic demands for more than two dozen changes to the conclusions.
``Every time we get to a situation where you think we can make some progress, I may be first and 20 on the goal line, and all of a sudden I'm first and 40,'' he said. ``I am getting more than a little tired of getting blamed.''
A Roberts spokeswoman, Sarah Little, said the committee is ``nearing completion'' on two parts of the five-section Phase II report: one on pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and another on the reliance of the U.S. intelligence community on information provided by foes of Saddam Hussein, some of which proved to be false.
No Timetable
She wouldn't provide a timetable for the release of the rest of Phase II, which is to focus on how the administration used the intelligence to build a case for the war.
Senator Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said the chairman has ``been very open at looking back and learning lessons'' about intelligence failures.
Roberts's critics said Democratic political maneuvering can't explain why his committee hasn't released Phase II after producing a widely praised Phase I investigation in July 2004 that focused on mistakes in pre-war intelligence collection and analysis.
Roberts said in the July 12 interview that he wanted to get key parts of the committee's probe declassified and released before the August recess -- though he postponed a committee vote after Democrats sought revisions to the report.
Promise and Delay
A similar pattern of promise and delay has affected the investigation almost since it was first launched in February 2004, 11 months after the invasion of Iraq.
After calling the report ``one of my top priorities'' in July 2004, Roberts in March 2005 played down the report's significance and echoed the administration's defense. ``The bottom line is, they believed the intelligence and the intelligence was wrong,'' Roberts said.
Roberts also praised the pre-war intelligence report of a commission chaired by former Senator Charles Robb of Virginia and federal appellate judge Laurence Silberman -- and called further investigation ``a monumental waste of time.''
In April 2005, Roberts said he would release the report's findings publicly. Three months later, he reconsidered that decision in a letter to Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat.
Paul Pillar, who served as the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and is a critic of the Bush administration's use of intelligence, said he was interviewed twice by Roberts' staffers. In the second meeting, in late 2005, he said, ``we covered almost exactly the same ground we covered before.''
Secret Programs
Roberts also has been reluctant to investigate controversial secret programs the administration created in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
He at first said he would consider probing a National Security Agency program to eavesdrop on conversations between U.S. residents and suspected terrorists overseas without court approval, then marshaled a majority of committee members to reject any investigation. He has said repeatedly the program is necessary for national security and that its disclosure by the news media has damaged its effectiveness.
At Cheney's behest, Roberts at first limited oversight of the NSA eavesdropping to a subgroup of the committee. He later reversed himself in the face of dissatisfaction within the panel.
NSA and Abu Ghraib
Roberts has left oversight of the NSA program and the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, which may have involved Central Intelligence Agency employees, mostly to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Armed Services Committee. He resisted Democratic pressure to probe CIA interrogation techniques and the agency's reputed network of secret overseas prisons for terrorist suspects.
Roberts hasn't always marched in lockstep with the administration. In 2004, he split with Bush by introducing legislation to overhaul the U.S. intelligence operations. The administration favored a less drastic alternative.
Roberts said his committee is doing a better job of oversight now than it did before Sept. 11, 2001. He said panel members ask CIA employees ``what do you know, what don't you know and what do you think?''
Loch Johnson, a political scientist at the University of Georgia in Athens who has written about the CIA, said Roberts' tenure has been a ``mixed picture.'' Johnson praised the Phase I report while criticizing Roberts for failing to complete the second phase or examine ``the questions of possible White House spinning and cherry-picking of intelligence.''
Roberts' reluctance to release that report is politically motivated, Johnson said: ``I have a feeling that Roberts has been told by the White House to lay off, and that is what he has done.''
Bloomberg
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