In a rare closed Senate session Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., singled out Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., for criticism, calling Roberts on his pledge to conduct a "phase two" intelligence report on the administration’s role in prewar Iraq intelligence.
"Despite the fact that the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee publicly committed to examine many of these questions more than 1½ years ago, he has chosen not to keep this commitment," Reid said. "Despite the fact that he restated that commitment earlier this year on national television, he has still done nothing."
It’s a good question: Where is the promised follow-up? The status of the report remains unclear; Roberts says his committee is wrapping it up as soon as next week; Democrats say very little work has been done. It’s good that both sides at least agreed to appoint a bipartisan panel to give a progress report on phase two.
The Plame leak investigation has renewed debate about the Bush team’s use (or misuse) of intelligence. This is important stuff, involving questions of how this country went to war. Americans deserve to get some answers.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
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30 Comments
Give em’ Hell, Harry!
Amen, Ed.
I wrote Senator Roberts yesterday while the Senate was still in closed-door session. His reponse should be interesting, if not necessarily prompt.
According to a report on ABC news Roberts said that just the day before they had come to an agreement to finish the report in 2 weeks.
Pure political grandstanding.
Day after day I loose more respect for Sen. Roberts. He has long been an at least semi moderate Republican. But he seems to have sold out to the WH.
Old Rubber Stamp?
If anybody can get to the bottom of the lies and rush to war, it’ll be the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Who then of course will bury the truth and publish a whitewash.
As Portia points out in the Merchant of Venice–”To offend and judge are distinct offices / And of opposed natures.”
Trouble is here we got the pot judging the kettle . . .
UN-FREAKING REAL.The neocons call a midnight special session to try and restore a functioning brain to a far too gone head injury victim (making total fools of the whole system), then cry FOUL when Harry actually had the guts to suggest they do the right thing for the ENTIRE country. HYPOCRITES.
Give em’ Hell, Tracy!
My dear patient the honorable Mr. Roberts indicated to me in a thearpy session that he put the promised follow up investigation in to memory ……. now he just can’t seem to remember where?
Signed your freadom friend in America!
Dr. Fraud
P.S. Now we are we have substitued being brain free and dumb for freedom in America!
Heckler,
‘Pure political grandstanding’?
Tell me, when Frist, Bush, Bush, and Delay used Teri Schaivo as a live action puppet before the national media, what was that again?
Frist and republicans are outraged, outraged I say, at this slap in the face by Senate Democrats. But I have no doubt the facts in the case will be well hidden. We won’t get to the bottom of this as long as republicans are running the show….goes against republican ideals to come clean. I think Reid deserves a pat on the back for standing up to the criminals in the Senate.
Ditto.Damn, can’t believe I said the nasty word.
Yeah, dammit! (Tracy made me say that) I want to know if Plame really sent her husband over to Iraq, knowing full well he knew nothing about WMD’s. I want to know why the MSM pukes are appalled at outing a CIA agent, but don’t understand why outing an entire CIA operation is OK.
Yeah! I want the whole story. I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take anymore! But, Randy. Can you handle the truth?
Out an entire CIA operation?
No one wants to do that.
What we want to do is figure out why Cheney said “capturing Saddam Hussein is not worth one American life” when he was Sec’ry of Defense and then “there can be NO DOUBT that Saddam Hussein has Weapons of Mass Destruction” [and must be overthrown] as Vice President.
Why did Cheney do the following–
“Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.
“Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration’s case for war with Iraq . . . ”
More at http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/1027nj1.htm
We don’t want to know CIA secrets. We want answers from a public official who is supposed to work for us.
It will be another white wash. If it goes to far it will implicate those in the whitehouse.
What a stunt. Ried is a doofus.
He might as well get the most out of it, he won’t get re-elected.
Thank you, Washington Post for outing this CIA operation. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644.html
Joe Williams,
Reid a ‘doofus’? Boy, even for you that’s a pretty idiotic thing to say.
As of October 27, 53% of Nevadans rated Reid as ‘excellent’ or ‘good.’ After the way he pantsed that no-balls, numb-nuts Frist, who cried like a pre-pubescent princess, Reid has all the job security a Senator could hope for. His numbers in Nevada are going to go way, way up.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2005/oct/27/102710224.html
The Senate has a new leader, and it ain’t Frist. You GOP pukes better think long and hard before you try to push any more bully tactics, particularly the ‘Nukular’ option. The Senate is construed so the Minority has a lot of power. And given how much smarter Reid is than Frist–demonstrably so–the ‘Nukular’ option shows every sign of backfiring in the worst imaginable way.
Joe Williams would be well advised to lay off the whatever he’s been smoking.
ID,
I second your thanks to the WaPo. Any nation that leads the free world has NO business employing Gulags.
Randy should be thankful he’s not on trial for the clear and willing distortion of the facts:
The Plame leak investigation has renewed debate about the Bush team’s use (or misuse) of intelligence. This is important stuff, involving questions of how this country went to war. Americans deserve to get some answers.Posted by Randy Scholfield
Fitzgerald Press Conference
QUESTION: A lot of Americans, people who are opposed to the war, critics of the administration, have looked to your investigation with hope in some ways and might see this indictment as a vindication of their argument that the administration took the country to war on false premises.
Does this indictment do that?
FITZGERALD: This indictment is not about the war. This indictment’s not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.
This is simply an indictment that says, in a national security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer’s identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person — a person, Mr. Libby — lied or not.
The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction.
And I think anyone’s who’s concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn’t look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.
FITZGERALD: They will be frustrated and, frankly, it would just — it wouldn’t be good for the process and the fairness of a trial.
Why don’t we let the professionals decide this, instead of the egg-spurts on this blog site.
CF
In the Shiavo case the Republicans were responding to an outcry from the people who put them in office. It became a big issue on talk radio and people started making phone calls a emails in mass. They responded to their constituents.
Grandstanding, maybe, but I can think of sillier things that Senators have gotten worked up over.
My point was that according to the report I heard, they had already agreed to a timeline for completing the report. I call it grandstanding because what they claimed they were protesting had already been settled.
CF
Alito will be confirmed, there will be no fillibuster. The man is better qualified than 2/3 of the current members. There are enough level headed Democrats to understand that they will be seen as bitter obstrucionists if they fillibuster.
HECK, pretty concise look into the future.Could you see about getting next week’s powerball numbers for me?Please?
TRACY
If I was that good I’d be out Elk Hunting in the Rockies, or fishing, or golfing, or deer hunting in Kansas, or shopping, or….something besides worrying over politics on this silly little blog.
Heckler,
Oh, you mean ‘bitter obstructionists’ like, say, Norman J. Ornstein from the American Enterprise Institute? In an op-ed piece he raised serious concerns about Alito’s lack of respect for the perogatives of the legislative branch. Here’s the link:
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.23406,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
Alito scares the hell out of many rational people, and not just because of Roe v. Wade.
And Heckler, I think the days when Republicans get to decide what counts as ‘bitter obstructionism’ are over. We’re in a different game now. It will be fun watching Frist think he still controls the agenda. He doesn’t. And when the Democrats take this thing all the way to a filibuster–which they will–they’ll be rewarded with electoral victory.
When that pendulum swings back, y’all had best get out of its way.
CF
I’ve already read the article you’ve linked to. Alito is exactly the type of Supreme Court Justice I like to see. The reasoning that he used in the machine gun case is a sound interpretation of the Interstate Commerce clause. I’m curious to know what you find so scary about his dissent in that case.
Again, the Commerce clause has been bastardized beyond recognition, in recent years however the S.C. has been showing signs of reigning in the power that the federal government has seized for itself.
CF,My link to WaPo outing a CIA operation was a back door slam to WaPo and those who said “WE would never out a CIA operation”. And you know who you are!You are being a drama queen, CF. Gulag? This is why your arguments are NEVER credible. Overstated. Over-rated. One sided. Never objective. Wait, that sounds like the MSM pukes. Are you a WE in disquise?
Okay, that’s it. I gotta go watch my dog take a shit.Thanks for visiting. Stay cool, and don’t believe anything the Bush administration tells you. In fact, play it safe: don’t believe anything anybody tells you.
George Carlin
ID,
So, is there a difference between an espionage operation and an illegal, secret detention facility? You bet there is. Read the law. Was this Gulag an ‘undercover’ espionage or counter-intelligence operation? It was not. It was an offshore detention facility designed by the CIA and the Adminstration to skirt U.S. and international law. Good riddance.
I can, with perfect consistency, protest the illegal outing of a CIA operative and the government’s secret decision to extrajudicially incarcerate individuals.
It’s always funny to hear Wingnuts like you snivel when someone states the fact that our secret prisons are Gulags. Seen the pix from Abu Gharib, ID? We’re running sexual torture chambers that feature indefinite detention when no formal charges have been filed. And we have many of them.
Ever read the “Gulag Archipelago” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn? Our prisons fit his description quite nicely.
The real issue is that your ‘President’ wants us to be able to incarcerate and torture with impunity. He just doesn’t want it to be called what it is: a Gulag.
When a Bush-worshipping whore like you challenges my ‘objectivity’ it can mean only one thing: I’ve hit a nerve. Methinks thou doth protest too much, ID.
Hooray for Reid and Durbin! Their constituents can know that they are truly concerned with the most important of government affairs, (namely committing the nation to war)
And Kansas? Well Kansas has Senator “Amen!” (Brownback) and Senator Amen bush! (roberts)
Now Brownback is gonna get his tail kicked running for President. That will demonstrate to the whole world “what is wrong with Kansas” And with Roberts called to the carpet to actually do his job. Well heck! If Kansas is so stupid to elect such morons to the Senate, maybe it’s up to the rest of the country, led by democrats, to send us a clue.
In other times, giving the identity of our most treasured assets, our covert information gatheres, to the outside world was treason.
Anyone commiting treason should be hung till 1/2 dead then burned out of memory.
The treason to retailiate against those who come forward to reveal the falsified war going on is not only a national crime – it is a crime against all humanity – unborn as well as all who are born!