Not sure if this is Pat Roberts attempt to punt the ball further downfield, but ...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon's inspector general has agreed to review the prewar intelligence activities of former U.S. defense undersecretary Douglas Feith, a main architect of the Iraq war, congressional officials said on Thursday.
News of the Defense Department probe comes at a time of bitter political debate over whether President George W. Bush misled the American people with prewar intelligence. The increasingly biter dispute has pitted the president and his top advisers against lawmakers including some from Bush's own Republican Party.
Democrats have accused Feith of manipulating information from sources including discredited Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi to suggest links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Hmmm... let's see... didn't somebody agree to get off their tails and make progress on a certain investigation lately? Who might that have been?
My favorite paragraph...
Congressional officials expect the review to look at whether Feith and his staff bypassed the CIA by giving the White House uncorroborated intelligence that sought to make a case for war in the months leading up to the 2003 Iraq invasion.
I'd always assumed that some kind of investigation into the Office of Special Plans would have been a given at some point in this process. Silly Me. All they had to do was go have a listen with Sy Hersh, maybe even fork over a few ducats for a copy of the printed magazine.
In the should I laugh or should I cry department, you won't have any problem envisioning Pat Robert's here...
Officials said the Pentagon's inspector general told the Senate its review would begin sometime in November. One official estimated the probe could take at least six months.
"We're going to try to expedite it as much as possible," said Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Senate intelligence panel chairman who asked the inspector general on September 9 for a review of Feith's Office of Special Plans.
"The IG knows we are very eager to get this done but he wants to get it done right," he told Reuters.
Very eager indeed <cough>. Is this why we haven't heard anything about the missed November 14 deadline for some progress on the reason Harry shut down the Senate?
I guess an ancillary question is... who exactly IS the pentagon's inspector general (now)? And would they be called upon in a case like this to whitewash Feith out of the picture. The article notes that "Feith, who was the Pentagon's policy chief until he left the Defense Department for the private sector earlier this year, was not immediately available for comment". Perhaps he knew the going was going to get a bit choppy.