Excerpt from Diary entry:
Remember the old song that goes "Johnny get angry...Johnny get mad...!"?
I can't imagine Senator Rockefeller getting "mad" and giving Pat Roberts the "biggest lecture he ever had". His passivity on this intelligence investigation, along with his Democratic counterparts, could prove a costly error for John Kerry's presidential campaign.
I want a brave man.
I want a cave man.
Democrats will be losers as long as they timidly allow the GOP continue to whitewash their crimes (including theft of internal Democratic memos) and run away unscarred.
At Salon,
Mary Jacoby is making a point to which I believe we need to pay close attention. As I reported
yesterday, there are two official WMD-related reports coming out soon. One is due today from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee. Ms Jacoby reveals, through unnamed sources, that the Democrats in the Senate are not being as forceful as they should be in looking out for the people's best interests. Once again (as in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion), our Democratic representatives in the Senate are wimping out on us. They're allowing Senator Pat Roberts and his GOP partners on the Intelligence Committee to blame it all on bad intelligence and delay the next phase ("Phase Two"), which will be examining the administration's decision to invade Iraq (using/abusing the bad intelligence). The Senate Democrats "laid the groundwork for their own political defeat" last February when they agreed to delay the second phase of the investigation until after this November's election.
Senator Roberts has allegedly been back-pedaling on "Phase Two" of this committee investigation, but the resolution establishing the committee clearly has extended its purview to the "use of information" about "collected, analyzed, produced and disseminated intelligence." A former Democratic aide is quoted as saying about the current report: "....they tried to put a bipartisan patina on it, but anybody who accepts that on face value is out of touch.." The Republicans are running the show on this committee and while we know it, most of the general public will only hear what the GOP wants them to hear.
The saddest part of the story is that our Democratic representation has wimped out again.
As the unnamed Democratic source told Ms Jacoby for this article, the Democrats need to push the envelope. I've commented previously (on Iddybud blog) that I felt Jay Rockefeller was too lame and tame on this issue and I don't see that he's changed one iota since.
An excerpt from the article will show you what I mean:
Roberts will argue that the report puts to rest the question of whether President Bush misled the nation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Instead, it was Bush who was misled by the Central Intelligence Agency, Roberts will contend. He will also note that of 200 intelligence analysts interviewed by the panel, none said they were ordered by the administration to tailor their reports to bolster the argument for war.
Rockefeller will parry that the issue is more complicated. Did the administration's predetermination that Iraq was a threat influence a politically pliable intelligence bureaucracy to produce judgments that would support that conclusion? And what about those intelligence analysts who said they felt no pressure -- did the committee ask them the right questions? Perhaps no one directly told them to change their conclusions, Rockefeller will argue, but it's less clear whether they faced more subtle institutional pressures to exaggerate the threat.
..According to Democratic sources... the committee focused narrowly on whether analysts were given direct orders to change wording. The panel did not explore the more nuanced question of whether institutional pressures and politics played a role in shaping the analysis. Rockefeller is expected to maintain that because the White House started from the premise that war was necessary, the intelligence bureaucracy was under pressure to tell policymakers what they wanted to hear.
Salon.com (subsc or one day free pass req)
Those questions of Senator Rockefeller's will be all well and good....but we know we won't have any answers until well after November, 2004 (and perhaps no investigation at all).
Remember the old song that goes "Johnny get angry...Johnny get mad...!"?
I can't imagine Senator Rockefeller getting "mad" and giving Pat Roberts the "biggest lecture he ever had". His passivity on this intelligence investigation, along with his Democratic counterparts, could prove a costly error for John Kerry's presidential campaign.
I want a brave man.
I want a cave man.
Democrats will be losers as long as they timidly allow the GOP continue to whitewash their crimes (including theft of internal Democratic memos) and run away unscarred.