Ex-Intel Committee Chair Blasts GOP Successor for Killing Torture Probe

[babylonsister]

Ex-Intel Committee Chair Blasts GOP Successor for Killing Torture Probe

— By David Corn

Wed Mar. 3, 2010 2:00 AM PST


A former Democratic senator who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the start of the US government's campaign against Al Qaeda tells Mother Jones he cannot fathom why his Republican replacement squashed his request for an independent review of the interrogation techniques then being used by the CIA. That onetime senator, Bob Graham of Florida, says he believes Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Utah) neglected his obligations as head of the intel panel by smothering Graham's proposal for a committee assessment of so-called enhanced interrogation practices.

On February 4, 2003, according to a CIA memo released last week, senior CIA officials—including Stanley Moskowitz, the agency's head of congressional liaison; Scott Muller, the agency's top lawyer; and James Pavitt, the deputy director for operations—presented a classified briefing in a Capitol Hill office to Roberts and an aide to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the committee. Over the course of nearly two hours, the briefers covered the CIA's brutal interrogation (or torture)—including waterboarding—of two detained terrorist suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and told Roberts of the agency's plan to destroy videotapes of the Zubaydah sessions. The memo noted that Roberts "posed no objection to what he had heard" and "supported the interrogation effort."

During the meeting, a Roberts aide asked Moskowitz if he had "taken up the line" a request Graham had made in late November 2002 for an independent committee inquiry into the CIA's interrogation program. (At that time, Graham had been chairing the intelligence committee, but he left the committee in January 2003, as Republicans took over the Senate.)

Moskowitz told Roberts and the others that the CIA would not allow any additional committee staffers to be briefed on the interrogation program. Nor would the spy service permit any committee staffer to review the interrogations in real time or visit the secret site where these sessions were occurring. Roberts didn't protest. In fact, at that point, according to the CIA memo, Roberts "interjected that he saw no reason for the committee to pursue request and could think of 'ten reasons right off why it is a terrible idea' for the committee to do any such thing as had been proposed." No committee investigation ensued.

more...

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/bob-graham-pat-roberts-torture-investigation-cia

[Echo In Light]

1. kick

[blm]

2. Pat Roberts was one of BushInc's top go-to senators for coverups, along with Bond and Hatch.

Despicable. Lied through their teeth about almost EVERY THING.

[starroute]

3. Roberts also kept squashing the Niger forgery investigations

I haven't looked at this stuff in detail for a few years -- but my recollection is that he was deeply in Cheney's pocket, that they'd been close since the 90's, and that any time Roberts started to waver, Cheney would talk to him and everything would be stalled again.