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http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002885.htmlSo who did the Vice President's office reach to for assistance in its campaign to blame all of Iraq on the CIA? Apparently, Pat Roberts, the chair of the Senate Select Intelligence committee, the committee that had promised to investigate how the US government got Iraq intelligence so wrong. Off and on the past couple months, I have been talking to staff on the committee, Republicans and Democrats, trying to figure out what's really happened with the promised Phase II SSCI report, that was supposed to examine US government officials' use of the intelligence. (The Phase I report, you'll remember, catalogued the intelligence community's role in the Iraq intel mistakes). Was Phase II totally dead and buried? Did it ever find anything before it was buried? Or was it still limping along, with an inkling of hope of ever seeing the light of day? Here's my piece on the missing report:
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10446
Earlier this week, as the piece was already at the printer, I was calling someone up for a quick question, and we got to talking about the latest Fitzgerald news from over the weekend. And I was told something that really stands out: that Roberts has literally been coordinating with Senate majority leader Frist and Cheney's office very closely on many aspects of the Senate Intelligence committee's supposed investigation of the intelligence, and in particular, working closely with Cheney's office on crafting the language defining and limiting the terms for the as-yet unfinished Phase II report. It hardly is surprising that Cheney took a big interest in what the Senate Select Intelligence committee might turn up in its investigation. But think about it. Here's the Congressional committee constitutionally mandated to provide oversight of all intelligence activities happening by the US government. And yet, here we have the Intelligence committee head coordinating to some degree with the Vice President's office, who we now know to be deeply involved in some of the most dubious of pre-war intelligence pronouncements, tasking, and cherry picking, and at the forefront of a post-war campaign to slime Wilson and his CIA officer wife. When Congress is in cahoots with the administration in stifling oversight, who can investigate the investigators? Unfortunately, it's not in Fitzgerald's mandate.
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