http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/07/opinion/07fri1.html
Playing Hardball With Secrets
Published: April 7, 2006
For more than two years, Senate Republicans have dragged out an investigation into how the Bush administration came to use bogus intelligence on Iraq to justify a war. A year ago, Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it "a monumental waste of time" to consider whether the White House manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Meanwhile, the evidence has steadily mounted that President Bush and his team not only did that before the war, but kept right on doing it after the invasion. The most recent additions to this pile came yesterday, in reports by The New York Sun, The National Journal and other news organizations on documents from the case against Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney who is charged with lying about the unmasking of Valerie Wilson, a covert C.I.A. agent.
According to these papers, Mr. Libby testified that President Bush authorized him to tell reporters about classified intelligence on Iraq as part of an effort to discredit Mrs. Wilson's husband, Joseph Wilson, a retired diplomat who had cast doubt on the claim that Iraq tried to acquire uranium for nuclear bombs from Niger. The National Journal reported that Mr. Libby has also said that Mr. Cheney authorized him to leak classified information before the invasion to make the case for war.
...We have seen no evidence that Mr. Bush authorized the outing of Mrs. Wilson. But at the least, revealing selected bits of intelligence, including information that officials may well have known to be false, seems like a serious abuse of power. It's not even clear that Mr. Bush can legally declassify intelligence at whim. Sen. Roberts has said that his committee looked into the use of intelligence by this administration. He is and his committee is charged with just that task, monitoring the executive branch, to ensure that the lives of our children are not thrown away in mindless political or geopolitical games. He pooh-poohed any mention of a more thorough 'Phase II' investigation, saying it had already occurred and that its findings are almost ready for publication. Yet this man, privy to the most sensitive intelligence, does not and did not say that Bush enabled the release of administration-friendly information and withheld that which strengthened the claims of their adversaries. He must have known it to be true but he appears to have actively concealed the fact from America.
It is axiomatic here that the entire GOP is complicit in facilitating the mess in which we find ourselves. All of them. Let us not be distracted by folk who mention the 'tone' of any political discussion, not when so many have died and have given so much blood. I don't want to hear how the president wants a 'dignified' conversation about Iraq, how he doesn't want to hear about 'misleading America into war'.
I really believe that Sen. Roberts is an excellent example of what the GOP, all of them, are doing and have done to this country. All I know is that in every race all over the country the GOP must be held accountable for creating this poisonous atmosphere. Sen. Roberts is clearly responsible because when he had the chance, he failed to clear the poison away. He should be an emblem of what could have been known but wasn't.
I don't really mean all of them. There must be some who honestly care about America. I remember a republican who was in charge of the department of Veteran's Affairs. He was canned because of his active advocacy for the veterans he represented. He was replaced by a party hack. Most members of the GOP, however, care primarily for the corporate interests of their contributors. They must be vilified with broad brushes. Their tales of failure, greed, corruption, mismanagement and enslavement to their corporate interests must be harvested as if they were crops for which we cared all spring and summer. Sen. Roberts is just low-hanging and ripe.
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