NYT: Republican Senator Roberts Faults Bid to Classify Report on Iraq

[DeepModem Mom]

Senator Faults Bid to Classify Report on Iraq
By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: August 4, 2006

WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 — The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee lashed out at the White House on Thursday, criticizing attempts by the Bush administration to keep secret parts of a report on the role Iraqi exiles played in building the case for war against Iraq.

The chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, announced Thursday that his committee had completed the first two parts of its long-delayed investigation of prewar intelligence. But he chastised the White House for efforts to classify most of the part that examines intelligence provided to the Bush administration by the Iraqi National Congress, a controversial exile group....

***

One completed section of the Senate report is said to be a harsh critique of how information from the Iraqi exile group made its way into intelligence community reports, said people who have read the report but spoke on condition of anonymity because it is still classified.

The second section compares prewar assessments of Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs and its links to terrorism with what American troops and intelligence operatives have found since the Iraq war began in March 2003....

***

...the current dispute is a sign that more than three years into the conflict, emotions remain raw over the role that the Iraqi group and its leader Ahmad Chalabi — who was close to Pentagon officials and Vice President Dick Cheney — played in the Bush administration’s decision to wage war against Saddam Hussein....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/04/world/middleeast/04intel.html

[TomInTib]

1. This would be great if it had any fangs..

Sounds like one of those Spector 'outrages'.

Piss and moan and then say that it has been settled and explained to his satisfaction.

[zulchzulu]

2. Wow...another GOP paper tiger with his finger in the wind...

Sounds like he and Specter shared a room on Fire Island last weekend...

Give it a rest, Roberts. You are a defanged, de-balled puppet.

[Rose Siding]

3. Dick didn't take Roberts' ego into consideration

A bridge too far, maybe?

[struggle4progress]

4. More of Roberts' BS. Congress should act like a coequal branch of govt

[grytpype]

5. Now we're getting somewhere!

I can't wait to see this report now. I was expecting it to be a whitewash, but it sounds like there will be some good stuff in there.

We already know Chalabi is and was an agent of Iranian intelligence, and the war plan was built around his lie that we would be greeted as liberators, and the Iraqis would accept Chalabi as their new Saddam.

Don't know if that's what's in the report, but it looks like half the Repugs on the committee didn't like it:

From the article:

"In the end, four Republicans on the committee and all seven Democratic members approved of the section of the report about the group. Four Republicans voted against it."