Senator Pat Roberts (R - KS) Helps to Fix the Intel

By Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane

Note: Both Roberts and Graham were part of the 8 members of Congress who retained their high level clearances. 

Deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley is leading the White House effort to sift through the intelligence with the help of the CIA, and is trying to determine what can be released without damaging the agency's ability to gather similar information, according to several intelligence officials. . . . 

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said he believed the administration's new case would be compelling but circumstantial -- "the transportation of 'X,' delivered to a shed where 'Y' is thought to be happening."

Roberts refused to say where Khalid was or how he is being questioned (but indicated he is way in the loop) . . . But Roberts lost all credibility when he claimed that Saddam is working with Al Qaeda and then brought up that abandoned "camp" in North Iraq (which is, Roberts somehow forgot to mention, OUT of Saddam's control -- for all intents and purposes, Saddam only controls about a third of "his" turf). Roberts claimed the camp has been identified as a terrorist training area and is a "poison center." 

One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, “These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.” 

The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office. 

It took Baute’s team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake

He urged the F.B.I. to ascertain the source of the documents, the skill-level of the forgery, the motives of those responsible, and “why the intelligence community did not recognize the documents were fabricated.” A Rockefeller aide told me that the F.B.I. had promised to look into it. 

That request came at the same time that members of the Senate intelligence panel asked the inspectors general of the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department to investigate the matter. The House and Senate intelligence committees are looking into the episode as well. 

Several prominent Republicans, even as they voice support for the military action against Iraq, say hearings are warranted. Over the weekend, Sen. John Warner, R-Virginia, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN, "We're going to look at this situation." 

But on Tuesday, Warner sounded a more cautious note, saying that he has scheduled no hearings . . . Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also stressed that no hearings have been scheduled. . . . "I think that it's very appropriate for the Congress to have hearings on the whole issue," said Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, noting that some lawmakers have charged that intelligence information was manipulated to suit the administration's agenda. " . . . 

On Capitol Hill, the Senate Intelligence Committee is to review classified background documents related to the administration's pre-war statements about WMD in Iraq. Sen. Pat Roberts, chairman of that committee, has not, however, scheduled a hearing about the matter, even though some lawmakers, mostly Democrats, are calling for such a move. Roberts said he wants to give the weapons hunt in Iraq more time. 

Roberts, on the other hand--a folksy jokester who has been named "funniest senator" by Washingtonian magazine--is a loyal defender of the White House. As questions have multiplied about the intelligence on Iraq, Roberts has seemed less interested in looking for errors and abuses than in political damage control. In early June, Warner--who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee--told the Los Angeles Times that he would support joint open hearings on the issue with Roberts; Roberts, he assured, "had been receptive to the idea." But, shortly after a Senate GOP meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney the following day, Roberts said such talk was "premature." Since then, Roberts has been busy lashing out at the president's critics.

"Some of the attacks have been simply politics and for political gain," he said at a June 11 press conference. "I will not allow the committee to be politicized or to be used as an unwitting tool for any political strategist." ...

Still, some hope that, if the media's revelations get bad enough, even Roberts will be shamed into action. "While [Roberts] has a tendency to be partisan, he also has a fiercely independent streak," says Dan Glickman, a former Kansas congressman who knows Roberts well. "By and large, Pat tries to do the right thing. I don't think he would lay down and play dead just to protect the president if he thought the president was wrong." So far, though, the Intelligence Committee chairman is showing no signs of life, and Rockefeller is doing nothing to resuscitate him. 

The move comes amid questions about whether the Bush administration manipulated intelligence data to bolster its case for war. 

Sen. Pat Robert, R-Kansas, made it clear that he has seen no evidence that any intelligence data was slanted or politicized, but he said the allegations from anonymous officials saying they were under pressure to "skew their analysis" were serious and "must be cleared up." 

"If any officials believe... that they have been pressured to alter their assessment, they have an obligation -- and I encourage them -- to contact the committee," Roberts said at a press conference attended by other Republican members of the Senate committee and his House counterpart. No Democrats attended the news conference. . . . 

At the White House, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said the administration would cooperate with Congress. 

"The administration welcomes the review," Fleischer said. "It's important. We always work together with Congress on dealing with the threat of Iraqi possession of WMD and we will continue to work with Congress on the facts that led previous administrations, Democrats, Republicans alike, to know that he had WMD."

Key Democrats called the GOP plan "entirely inadequate" and accused the administration of "hyping" intelligence data, as the debate over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - which until now has focused on the White House, CIA, and State Department - found full voice in Congress. 

At a news conference that appeared aimed at quelling mounting Democratic criticism, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said the committee continues to review intelligence documents on weapons and plans to focus on them in closed-door hearings starting next week. 

"We are going to complete a very thorough review of all the documentation" supplied by intelligence agencies, he said. "It seems sensible to do that kind of homework before you talk about a formal investigation of this or that or the other thing." 

Roberts said some of the criticism of intelligence operations was politically inspired. "I will not allow the committee to be politicized or to be used as an unwitting tool for any political strategist," he said. 

SEN. CARL LEVIN: "He has no objects to releasing the number. That's the only question. It's not a question of confidence in Blix. If you're using Hans Blix as the relationship as the excuse not to release your own number in the CIA, Hans Blix says he doesn't have any objections." 

SEN. PAT ROBERTS: "In terms of criticism it's like a mosquito bite, so I urged him to put on some American insecticide. "

Sen. Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican and chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia Democrat and ranking committee member, dismissed the comments as political while appearing on "Fox News Sunday." 

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. . . .

Those are the facts surrounding my efforts. The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government.

The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses. (It's worth remembering that in his March "Meet the Press" appearance, Mr. Cheney said that Saddam Hussein was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons.") At a minimum, Congress, which authorized the use of military force at the president's behest, should want to know if the assertions about Iraq were warranted. 

A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet's statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, had a role in Tenet's statement.

“Senator Rockefeller and I are committed to continue our close examination of all of the issues surrounding the Niger documents. 

“So far, I am very disturbed by what appears to be extremely sloppy handling of the issue from the outset by the CIA. 

“What now concerns me most, however, is what appears to be a campaign of press leaks by the CIA in an effort to discredit the President. 

In an unusual on the record briefing Tuesday, Mr. Hadley took the blame for a statement, discredited by the Central Intelligence Agency, in President Bush's State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa. The President had used the statement, in part, to make the case for going to war in Iraq. 

Mr. Hadley acknowledged he had received warnings from the C-I-A about the veracity of the statement. 

Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he has already made the request for testimony from the White House aide involved. 

"We have made an inquiry with the National Security Council, with [National Security Adviser Condoleeza] Rice and asked to meet with Mr. Hadley and any other person that might be of particular interest to us," Mr. Roberts said Wednesday on C-SPAN television. "So we will be in the business of taking a hard look at that." 

On Tuesday, Deputy National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, told reporters about two CIA memos and a phone call from CIA Director George Tenet that should have prevented a reference to alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa from appearing in the president's State of the Union Address. Senator Robert's request for testimony from White House aides comes as the intelligence committee in the House of Representatives prepares to hold its first public hearing on Thursday. 

Note: Porter Goss was the chairman of the House Intel Committee and one of the 8 members of Congress to retain clearance.

The letter constitutes a significant criticism of the U.S. intelligence community from a source that does not take such matters lightly. The committee, like all congressional panels, is controlled by Republicans, and its chairman, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), is a former CIA agent and a longtime supporter of Tenet and the intelligence agencies. Goss and the committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), signed the letter. Neither was available for comment yesterday. The full committee has not voted on the letter's conclusions. 

The CIA, through spokesman Bill Harlow, disputed the conclusions and accused the panel of not conducting "a detailed inquiry on this study." "The notion that our community does not challenge standing judgments is absurd." ( . . . ) "To attempt to make such a determination so quickly and without all the facts is premature and wrong," Harlow said. "Iraq was an intractable and difficult subject. The tradecraft of intelligence rarely has the luxury of having black-and-white facts. The judgments reached, and the tradecraft used, were honest and professional -- based on many years of effort and experience." 
 

NBC News' Andrea Mitchell reported Friday night that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate whether White House officials blew Plame's cover in retaliation against Wilson. Revealing the identities of covert officials is a violation of two laws, the National Agents' Identity Act and the Unauthorized Release of Classified Information Act. 

Ashcroft, an appointee of U.S. President George W. Bush, told a news conference in Washington yesterday: "The Department of Justice received from the Central Intelligence Agency a request for a criminal investigation concerning a possible violation of federal law regarding an alleged unauthorized disclosure of classified information. After a prompt review of this request, the criminal division of the Department of Justice, with the assistance of the FBI as the lead investigative agency, opened a full investigation." 

It is rare for the Justice Department to conduct a full criminal probe into an alleged leak of classified information. 

    Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

    During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger.

The lack of substantive findings so far brought immediate negative reactions from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress - and also seemed certain to raise new questions among allies overseas about the Bush administration's justification for going to war. 

"I'm not pleased by what I heard today, but we should be willing to adopt a wait and see attitude - and that's the only alternative we really have," said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. . . . 

Separately, CIA Director George J. Tenet, in a letter to the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee obtained by The Associated Press, rejected congressional criticism that the prewar intelligence findings were flawed. 

Tenet's statement came in response to a blistering letter from Reps. Porter Goss, R-Fla., and Jane Harman, D-Calif., the heads of the House intelligence committee. That letter, dated Sept. 25, cited "significant deficiencies with respect to the collection activities concerning Iraq's WMD and ties to al-Qaida prior to the commencement of hostilities there." 

The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. . . . 

Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence. . . . 

Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership." . . . 

The whole point of the intelligence system in place, according to Thielmann, was “to prevent raw intelligence from getting to people who would be misled.” Bolton, however, wanted his aides to receive and assign intelligence analyses and assessments using the raw data. In essence, the under-secretary would be running his own intelligence operation, without any guidance or support. “He surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get C.I.A. information directly,” Thielmann said. . . . 

As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President’s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq’s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing a report evaluating why U.S. intelligence about the threat that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed to U.S. interests exaggerated the severity of the threat. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the panel's chairman, was quoted Friday as saying the White House was served badly by the CIA, which provided "sloppy" prewar intelligence. 

Sen. John "Jay" Rockefeller, D-W.Va., responded Friday by saying that Roberts was trying to "lay all of this out on the intelligence community and never get to any other branches of government; in particular the White House and associated high and visible government agencies." . . . 

A senior administration official, who agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity, said Roberts' CIA comments were issued with Cheney's encouragement. The official said Cheney is trying to shift the blame for the lack of progress in Iraq, which is becoming an issue in next year's presidential and congressional elections, from the White House to the CIA. The Roberts aide denied that encouraged Roberts to criticize the CIA. 

The committee staff was surprised by the amount of circumstantial evidence and single-source or disputed information used to write key intelligence documents — in particular the Oct. 2002 National Intelligence Estimate —summarizing Iraq’s capabilities and intentions, according to Republican and Democratic sources. . . . 

Asked about the upcoming report, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the committee, said “the executive was ill-served by the intelligence community.” The intelligence was sometimes “sloppy” and inconclusive, he said. “That’s a concern I have with the total report” on Iraq. 

“I worry about the credibility of the intelligence community,” said Roberts, who added that he is concerned about demoralizing the intelligence agencies when intensive counterterrorism operations are going on overseas. Still, he insisted, “If there’s stuff on the fan, we have to get the fan cleaned.” 

Despite the progress it has made since June in poring over 19 volumes of classified material, the committee is deeply divided over investigating how the Bush administration used intelligence in its public statements about Iraq. 

Sen. John “Jay” Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) said yesterday he had secured a promise from Roberts to ask one executive agency, the Defense Department and, in particular, its Office of Special Plans, for information about the intelligence it collected or analyzed on Iraq. 

The office has been accused by some congressional Democrats and administration critics of gathering unreliable intelligence on Iraq that bolstered the administration’s case for war. Those allegations have not been substantiated, and the director of the office, William Luti, has denied them. 

At stake is whether the U.S. public, Congress and allies abroad were misled into backing U.S. President George W. Bush's decision to wage war on Iraq, as Democratic presidential contenders contend. 

The opening salvos were fired this week when an early draft of a Senate Intelligence Committee report was leaked to The Washington Post. That draft, apparently prepared by staff under the control of the Republican chairman, fingers the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and other security authorities, faulting them for overstating both the threat of weapons of mass destruction and Baghdad's links with terrorism.. . . 

In the wake of the leaked draft, which lays the blame squarely on intelligence agencies and in effect exonerates the President, Mr. Rockefeller, the committee's vice-chairman, denounced any rush to judgment. "I'm not going to characterize it as a whitewash," he said. "I'm going to characterize it as a very incomplete matter." 

Kansas Republican Pat Roberts, who chairs the intelligence committee, has said he wants the report completed quickly and clearly expects it to blame the CIA and other intelligence agencies. 

"The executive was ill served by the intelligence community," he said yesterday, characterizing their work as sloppy and inconclusive. 

Getting the report out quickly, and long before the presidential finger-pointing begins in earnest, appeals to Republicans. So does absolving the White House of blame. 

"It's my belief that what he [Mr. Roberts] wants to do is to lay all of this out on the intelligence community and never get to any other branches of government," Mr. Rockefeller said yesterday. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, said he believes committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., wants to place all responsibility for problems on the intelligence agencies "and never get to any other branches of government, in particular the White House'' and related agencies. 

Roberts was traveling in Kansas and his spokeswoman did not immediately return calls seeking comment. 

The dispute renewed an unusual public rift on a committee that traditionally has sought to maintain a nonpartisan appearance. The two senators have clashed before over the scope and structure of the Iraq intelligence inquiry. 

Roberts told reporters this week that the inquiry is about 95 percent done and a draft report could be circulated among panel members shortly. But Rockefeller said the investigation "is far from completed.'' 

"We have not gotten into the use of intelligence,'' he told reporters. "We are going to do that one way or another, I guarantee you, because that's absolutely fundamental to this whole thing.'' . . . 

Both the House and Senate Intelligence committees have been investigating. Last month, the leaders of the House committee wrote to Tenet criticizing "significant deficiencies'' in intelligence collection in Iraq. Tenet has rejected the criticism. 

Note: Daschle is 1 of 8 members of Congress to retain his security clearance.

The remarks from the panelists were sharp and passionate. They each decried the leak, criticized Bush's lackadaisical response to it, and blasted the Bush allies who have downplayed the significance of the leak and politicized the issue by attacking Joseph Wilson. The three men demolished much of the spin that has been coming from Republican circles. "Anyone who would care to try to portray this action as merely negligent, as opposed to deliberate, should also be prepared to explain how anyone so completely inept as to divulge this information by accident ever became a ‘senior official' in any organization, let alone an organization running the country," Marcinkowski remarked in his prepared statement. "What sickens me," said Johnson, "is the partisan nature that the White House has allowed [the leak controversy] to take on." Johnson noted that he had written his remarks with two other CIA veterans who had trained with Valerie Wilson--Michael Grimaldi and Brent Cavan--and that he and his co-authors were Republicans who had voted for Bush and contributed money to his presidential campaign. 

Cannistraro told the senators he had heard from current CIA officials that before the war there was "a pattern of pressure" from the Bush White House aimed at pressing the CIA to produce intelligence that backed the case for invading Iraq. He pointed to visits to CIA headquarters made by Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff Lewis Libby, who met with "desk-level" analysts. The analysts, Cannistraro said, maintained there was no intelligence to support the allegation that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium in Africa, and Cheney responded by telling them they were not looking hard enough. "This is the first time in 27 years I have ever heard of a vice president sitting down with desk analysts and…pushing them to find support for something he believes," Cannistraro said. "That is pressure." 

The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. 
 

(See also Information Clearing House for more on the leak of this document, Cheney's support of it, and McGovern's and Cannistraro's outrage.) 

In a letter to CIA Director George Tenet, Republican Sen. Pat Roberts and Democrat Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: "We can be neither complete nor thoughtful, however, without the information we have requested from various elements of the intelligence community." . . . 

Their letter singled out information requested in July on the intelligence suggesting Iraq had sought uranium from the African country of Niger. That claim, now considered discredited, was part of President Bush's State of the Union address. 
 

Roberts, R-Kan., and top Democrat Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia wrote the letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and national security adviser Condoleeza Rice complaining that their agencies were moving too slow.

A similar letter was sent Wednesday to CIA Director George Tenet.

"We must take whatever steps are necessary to assure our nation that U.S. intelligence is accurate and unbiased,'' Thursday's letters said. "The credibility of the government with its people and the nation with the world is at stake.''

A White House spokesman said the administration was "surprised by the substance and tone of the letter.'' The White House has been assisting the committee in its review of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, he said.

Part of the dispute with the White House appears to center on requests for highly classified intelligence reports — known as the president's daily brief — that summarize the most critical international developments and new intelligence, and is delivered to the president each morning.

The standoff with the White House is certain to add to the tension between the committee and the administration over the inquiry, and fuel criticism from Democrats that the administration is trying to escape accountability for its pre-war claims about Baghdad's alleged illicit weapons programs. . . .

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued remarks indicating he thinks the White House does not fully understand the stakes of the investigation. But he stopped short of threatening to issue subpoenas.

The committee is asking for copies of the Bush's daily intelligence briefings in the days leading up to the war.

A typical White House stonewall consists of public pledges of cordial cooperation with investigators, followed by private resistance, delay, excuses, partial compliance or self-righteous assertion of constitutional prerogatives.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan, while reminding reporters that Congress does not have jurisdiction over the presidency, still insists "we're willing to be helpful. We're working very cooperatively with them (the committee)."

If that's true, then why doesn't the White House hand over the documents being sought by the Senate committee?

Amazingly, the answer is more or less, ‘Yes, this is possible.’ Technically, though, it’s not a parallel process — just a committee activity organized by interested Senators. Any five members can call a committee meeting even if the Chair doesn’t want them to (Rule 1.5).

The memo, provided late Tuesday by a source on the Committee and reported by Fox News' Sean Hannity, discusses the timing of a possible investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence in such a way that it could bring maximum embarrassment to President Bush in his re-election campaign.

Among other things, the memo recommends that Democrats "prepare to launch an investigation when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the [Senate] majority. We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation of the administration's use of intelligence at any time — but we can only do so once ... the best time would probably be next year."

Republicans want to keep the probe focused on the accuracy of assessments by the intelligence agencies on Iraq leading up to the war, while Democrats want to broaden the inquiry to include how the Republican White House used the information.

The memo was "very troubling to me," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, said. "I'm pretty despondent right now, it's sort of like a personal slap in the face after you have worked over time to come up with what we think is going to be a very good report on how to improve our intelligence capabilities," he told Reuters.

Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the committee, said in a statement the draft staff memo was likely leaked to the press after being taken from a waste basket or through unauthorized computer access and had not been approved or shared with members of the committee.

"Having said that, the memo clearly reflects staff frustration with the conduct of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation and the difficulties of obtaining information from the administration," Rockefeller said.

Roberts and Rockefeller last week jointly sent letters to the White House, CIA, Pentagon and State Department demanding that documents be delivered and interviews with officials be scheduled by a noon deadline last Friday.

The White House, noting that the panel had no jurisdiction over it, said it would cooperate, but committee sources said it had not yet made available the documents.

Referring to a memo revealing the Democratic plot obtained Tuesday afternoon by radio host Sean Hannity, Roberts told the Fox News Channel that the document may have "all sorts of repercussions for intelligence agencies all throughout the world and certainly does a disservice in regards to the war against terrorism."

In an editorial Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported:

"[Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-WV,] refuses to denounce the memo, which he says was unauthorized and written by staffers. If that's the case, at the very least, some heads ought to roll. A good place to start would be minority staffer Christopher Mellon, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton administration."  . . .

The Journal recommended that, until those responsible for the Democrats' decision to politicize intelligence are fired, the Intelligence Committee should be "shut down, cleaned out and reconstituted later, preferably after the next election."

On Wednesday Democratic Sen. Zell Miller said attempts by committee Democrats to undermine an American president at a time of war were "perhaps treasonous."

"If what has happened here is not treason, it is its first cousin," Miller charged, in a statement released by his office.

"The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has been harmed by a blatant partisan attack," the Tennessee Republican said in a floor speech yesterday, concluding that the memo had rendered the committee "incapable of meeting its responsibilities to the United States Senate and to the American people."

"Those responsible for this memo appear to be more focused on winning the White House than they are on winning the war against terror," Frist complained before adding, "There will be no more pulling along and no more useful collaboration on partisan schemes."

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts echoed Frist's decision to shut his committee down, saying, "Unless and until this reprehensible attack plan and strategy to derail the committee's important work is properly addressed, I am afraid that it will be impossible to return to business as usual in the committee.

Roberts is not allowing this aspect of the investigation to take place, stating that the probe is already "90 to 95 %" finished. No questions about the dozens of public statements made by the Bush administration about Iraq's weapons capabilities have been allowed. No questions about the Office of Special Plans, which was created out of whole cloth by Rumsfeld for the specific purpose of re-interpreting CIA and State Department intelligence reports, have been allowed. No questions about repeated visits to CIA headquarters by Dick Cheney, who went there to browbeat intelligence analysts for more aggressive interpretations of the threat posed by Iraq, have been allowed. Roberts has already made it clear that the CIA is to blame for the fact that there are no weapons in Iraq, and is blocking Rockefeller and the Democrats from questioning this dubious premise.

The memo prepared by Rockefeller stated that the Democrats need to try to steer the inquiry towards these matters. Failing that, the memo said, Democrats should try to launch a separate, independent investigation into these matters because the Intelligence Committee chaired by Roberts was being used to defend the White House from taint. "We have an important role to play," read the memo, "in revealing the misleading, if not flagrantly dishonest, methods and motives of senior administration officials who made the case for unilateral pre-emptive war."

When this memo fell into the hands of Sean Hannity and Fox, a concerted attempt was made to turn the existence of the memo into a major scandal. Hannity railed that this memo would cause several Senators to resign, that it was proof the Democrats want to turn the investigation into nothing more than a political witch hunt. Various members of the mainstream press jumped on this rhetorical bandwagon. The Los Angeles Times, in one example, described the revelation of the memo in terms to warm Hannity's heart: "The tone of the memo could be embarrassing to Democrats and provides new ammunition for Republican complaints that Democrats are seeking to use the inquiry for political gain."

Roberts demanded that Rockefeller denounce the memo, but Rockefeller refused to do so. Roberts used this as an excuse to cancel further Intelligence Committee hearings on the matter, and froze completely the investigation. For all practical purposes, the Congressional investigation into the rhetoric surrounding our rush to war in Iraq is over.

The Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, was startled. He informed his staff that Rockefeller had told him that he personally ordered aides to give him "options" -- an order that produced the now infamous memo. To the plainspoken ex-Marine from Dodge City, trust had been breached. His committee will remain dormant, conducting no hearings, until some Democrat on the committee -- preferably Rockefeller -- disavows the memo's contents. That is not about to happen. . . .

The partisan tone among the committee's Democrats has been sounded by Levin and his lieutenant, Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois. Levin set the line on Fox News Sunday Nov. 9: "Did the administration, knowing what they knew, with daily briefings, exaggerate the intelligence (about Iraq)? The chairman of this committee and the Republicans refuse to look at the administration's use of exaggeration of intelligence."

The point Levin wants to pursue is that intelligence professionals were pressured by Bush officials to distort their findings. The committee's non-partisan staff has come up with no such information and has had no such complaints made from whistle-blowers in the intelligence community. Democratic demands to leap over the staff produced the memorandum which has laid waste the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"I think we will have, hopefully, some public hearings by February," announced Pat Roberts, chairman of the US Senate intelligence committee, appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation" program. "We will get those questions out."

The apparent change of heart came after the CIA acknowledged late last month that it "lacked specific information" about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction when it compiled a 2002 intelligence estimate that served to justify the invasion.

Congressional Republicans also found themselves under renewed pressure last week after Bush, when asked in a television interview to clarify whether he had hard facts about Iraqi weapons or just feared Baghdad may acquire them, replied: "So what's the difference?"