Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is supposed to be wrapping up an investigation of whether the White House misused and cherry-picked intelligence information in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
It will be interesting to see if Roberts’ unyielding defense of the White House on this point will hold up in light of revelations from people such as Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst who wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that the Bush team “used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made.”
Pillar is attracting his critics, too. But such charges can’t be dismissed out of hand. Roberts has a responsibility to get to the truth. Will he deliver?
Posted by Randy Scholfield
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19 Comments
C’mon, everyone knows the reason the investigation was never finished and probably will never be finished is because Roberts won’t let it.
The only true findings would have to be that the administration cherry picked it’s intelligence to fool the American Public into a war that our children will pay for too long.
Add that Afghanistan is consistently leaning towards the Taliban again.
If the president would have focused on Afghanistan and finished it’s mission there before starting another war in Iraq the situation could be different.
Did they learn anything? I”d say no, since we appear to be on the brink of another war with Iran.
Two wars that are going badly and we’re going to start another one.
If Roberts ever finished the report and there was a shred of truth in ‘his’ findings the American public might pull it’s head out of the sand.
I have confidence that Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas will do the right thing on this much touted report. He has a good track record in the U.S. Senate.
Roberts will stick to his defense of Bush. Always has, always will.
Totally. Roberts the company man will go on providing political cover for a renegade Administration, and continue to abdicate the specific duties that are his as a member of the Senate.
Roberts needs to put Patriotism ahead of Party, for once!
Roberts will probably have to take on the Cheney inquiry, you know he’d have loved to headed up the Katrina fiasco.
He’ll deliver whatever white washed, white house, version of events Rove tells him to deliver. And dissenting testimoney? Um, this is the GOP y’all. Get real. No dissent allowed.
Gee whiz, dont you guys know anything about chain of command? Roberts is a good soldier. He will do as he is told. And Kansans will think he really does a good job of representing us and they will send him back to Washington to continue the good works.
Couldnt “dodge city” Pat have at least negotiated a better farm bill before he sold out? He got nothing in exhange for his soul. I wonder if he will do some horse trading with me!
Randy,That former CIA analyst you speak of is only stating the obvious. However, you must also tell of the scare-tactics embodied by the whole Color-coded terror alert system. Control of the masses through fear, ah, how very Machiavellian.
CruzX, you’re criticising our fearless leader again.
The conservatives are going to turn on you like a pack of jackals one of these days.
Just giving you fair warning.
It’s not too late to leave the dark side, young Luke . . .
Remember when they called Captain Queeg “Old Yellow Stain” in the Caine Mutiny (after he ordered his crew to drop some yellow markers and run for cover in a war zone)?
I think we should start calling Pat Roberts “Old Rubber Stamp.”
PL,Hahaha! Well if they do want to cross swords with me, then let them!However, The liberals choose to defend the ACLU. The ACLU defends NAMBLA, that is why I could not “switch sides.”The Jedi are moderates like myself, because according to Obi Wan Kenobi “only the Sith deal in absolutes.” (Episode 3)Concerning the “Old Rubber Stamp” I only have one thing to say. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!
We need to vote Roberts out. Hes been nothing but a lap dog and a mouthpiece for the President/GOP.
Hes been purposely dragging his feet, because he knows the truth will hurt the President/GOP
Gary, um…Those are considered GOOD things by the majority of oh-so-righteous and concerned Kansas voters.
Here are the questions I suggested Tim Russert ask the good Senator when he appears as a guest this Sunday on Face the Nation:
Where do we stand on the Phase II Hearing of the Intelligence Committee, looking into whether the intelligence failures resulted from attempts of executive branch efforts to create alternative NIE [ National intelligence Estimate] supportive of an agenda to invade Iraq, much as was done by the “Team B” in 1976 to challenge the official prevailing NIE of the Soviet Threat which history as likewise shown to be false?
Do the similarities between the 1976 “Team B” and and 2000 WHIG and OSP teams concern you in terms of how intelligence was generated and presented to the president, in terms of their implications, and in terms of their accuracy?
Will your Intelligence committee present evidence and testimony to the American People to support your view, and resolve the concerns of creating alternate NIE’s?
Does it concern you that those involved with “Team B” in 1976 are the same folks (GHBush,Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld,Dick Cheney) that are responsible for what turned out to be a false view of WMD?
Karl von Clausewitz and Bernard Brodie have argued that the first casualty of war is not truth, but reason. Is your Intelligence Committee willing to address my concerns that the way we are gathering and using intelligence is appropriate, and directed toward the peace and security of the American people, rather than towards creating a climate of fear designed to further a political and economic agenda of a small group of elite Americans?
Will NBC air the BBC and Cannes Film Festival documentary “Power of Terror” discussing the similarities between the 1976 Team B effort to create and alternate NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] and the current effort to create an alternate NIE by the WHIG and the OSP?
Is Sen. Pat Roberts willing to address and resolve that issue in his Phase II of the Intelligence Committee?
When will hearings on that Committee resume?
by the Son of a Team A member
PS:
some background links:
http://tinyurl.com/agd3d
http://tinyurl.com/ak2k9
PPS . Let’s all of us go into this with an open mind, and review the evidence before reaching a verdict. But it does seem what we have now is straight out of “Alice in Wonderland” when the Queen of hearts states “sentence first, trial later” . If one does an honest accounting of the war on terrorism along the lines of Nobel Prize winning economist Stiglitz, we have a present value cost of over $1Trillion. If we assume there are as many as 50,000 terrorists we feel need to be neutralized, that works out to $2Million/ terrorists. And that assumes terrorists are not being created at a rate faster than being eliminated. It is precisely this arrogance that caused the USSR to collapse. Let’s be very clear headed about reality, our purpose,and our options and not throw reason completely out the window.
Whoa, Erich, erudition like that is a welcome addition to the Blog.
Keep it coming, my friend.
Erudition. That’s what I miss now that Galahad no longer posts here. Where can I go for that?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/16/AR2006021602186.html
See above link. If Sen. Pat “Coverup” Roberts can’t kill the whistleblower-messenger (wasn’t Paul Revere one?), then he asks Congress for more restrictive laws (see above link).
“Coverup” should be Pat Roberts’s middle name, and that’s how I address his mail.http://argentina.indymedia.org/news/2006/01/369565.php
I think Kansas needs a senator that will represent Kansas in the context of the national interest and Kansans instead of George W. Bush.
I couldn’t agree more. To sell off the public and trade high oil and drug prices for corporate profits is one thing- but to sell off national security and risk bankrupting this country on the premise that selling fear is almost always a winning strategy is another.
For some thoughts on a successful national strategy, one might consider a proven one in a GOP stronghold-Montana.
http://tinyurl.com/4k8as
Excellent post Erich.
In the same vein – the intel leading up to the war – the head of British Foreign Intelligence spends some time in the US, presumably talking to his allies (our administration’s leadership) Rummy and Wolfowitz and Rice probably, and comes away making the statement that the ‘the intelligence is being fixed’ around the premise that Hussein has WMDs and that he is a threat.
Noone has said the Downing Street memo was fake and the biggest explanation was from Woolsey who claimed that “fixed” meant something different in Britain. He was resoundingly laughed out of the court of public opinion from persons on both sides of the pond.
So the story sits. I’m sure the British intel chief didn’t spend his week over here talking to Howard Dean or John Kerry. He formulated that opinion after talking to the war’s architects.
I also suspect he hadn’t risen to his position (a regular briefer of Tony Blair) while predisposed to getting the whole thing completely wrong once in a while.
Can anyone please tell me why we as a society, can’t just add up a simple collection of facts like these and keep asking questions till we get answers that add up to the same total?