The Senate Intelligence committee is going to hold hearings concerning the Intelligence agencies use of cover for it's employees. Well we all know where this is headed don't we?
The NYT has the story
The Senate Intelligence Committee will conduct hearings on American spy agencies' use of cover to protect the identities of intelligence officers, the committee chairman said on Sunday.
The chairman, Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, said on the CNN program "Late Edition" that the committee was "going to go into quite a series of hearings in regard to cover." The practice of intelligence cover has come under scrutiny during the investigation of the disclosure of the C.I.A. employment of Valerie Wilson, who had worked under cover for the agency for 18 years before being publicly identified as a C.I.A. operative in 2003.
"You cannot be in the business of outing somebody" working under cover, Mr. Roberts said. He said, however, there were questions about the depth of Ms. Wilson's cover, because she had been based at the Virginia headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency at least since 1997.
"I must say from a common-sense standpoint, driving back and forth to work to the C.I.A. headquarters, I don't know if that really qualifies as being, you know, covert," Mr. Roberts said. "But generically speaking, it is a very serious matter."
I have a question for Mr. Roberts. If he's so damned interested in the importance of protecting the cover of agents and the effects of outing one maybe he should have shown up at the hearings the Democrats had Friday where they met with former intelligence agents.
So where was he Friday that he couldn't make time to walk down the hall to that room?