Ottoe
Time to write your favorite columnist or whomever to counteract all the disingenuous spinning from the echo chamber about the now-famous "leaked" Intel Committee Democratic staff memo.
Sure, it's embarrassing, on some level. The memo explicitly says that the minority on the committee hadn't been expecting the majority to take the investigation of Iraq Intel failures beyond pinning them on the CIA, and that now having received some cooperation in that regard from Roberts et al they still expect that cooperation to end soon. That's pretty shameful--shameful behavior on the part of the Majority! For the minority staffers to describe it accurately in a memo is perhaps a bit harsh--but they weren't the ones who made the memo public!
The people who should be embarrassed are the majority members of the committee, whose kowtowing to the Administration the memo simply takes for granted. Anyone following Chairman Roberts's remarks over the past six months is aware that he's not exactly Chuck Hagel. The memo just lays out a pattern of majority behavior, and a plan of how the minority might despite such interference nevertheless learn and publicize the TRUTH. Which is the point of an INVESTIGATION. All the majority puffery about understanding that investigations lead we know not wither etc etc can't undo the fact that so far this investigation has been blinkered, and is still being hampered, albeit less blatantly than at first. This is the real partisan scandal.
If Jay Rockefeller can at once stand by the contents of the memo and blast its leaking as a breach of decorum, all he's saying is that whereas the minority forbore saying in public (for attribution, anyway) that the majority was carrying water for the Administration, the majority seems to have preferred to get this accusation out in the open so that they can claim it is a partisan smear. Really? We'll see in the weeks and months ahead. Deeds not words! When is the date set for Douglas Feith's public testimony?