2003 Dishonest Reporting "Award"

For any lurking reporters who aren't up to speed.

A Devastating Demo Memo By Adam Sparks [Full text] "Four things belong to a judge: to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly and to decide impartially." -- Socrates, 470-399 B.C.

A devastating memo written by a Democratic member of the staff of the U.S. Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence and leaked to Fox News is now creating a furor on Capitol Hill.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is charged with protecting the nation's most guarded secrets. The members of that panel have the nation's highest security clearance. Much of the sensitive information they review is for their eyes only and is off limits even to the senators' own aides. Historically, this committee has been the least politicized of all the congressional committees. After all, it oversees the nation's intelligence community. Its duty, of safeguarding the nation, has historically been above the political fray. Until now, that is.

To congressional Democrats, nothing is sacred any longer: Even the nation's top secrets are fair game for staking out cheap, partisan political advantage. On Nov. 5, Fox News published a document that details the nefarious plans of the Democratic Party for politicizing the evidence that would be found in the Intelligence Committee's ongoing study of an intelligence fiasco. The evidence under review was received from the Bush administration, which was fully cooperating with the committee.

The Intelligence Committee hearings were called to investigate the sequence of events leading up to the military buildup that led to Saddam's overthrow and to the Iraqi liberation. The memo describes the brazen, unorthodox and fraudulent techniques the Democrats would actually use in order to gain power in the 2004 elections.

Originally, the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.), downplayed the significance of the memo and suggested it is the work of an overzealous aide and not the actual plan of committee Democrats. The memo, directed to the other Democratic members of the committee, reads, in part, "Pull the majority [Republicans] for as long as we can on issues that may lead to disclosures of . . . questionable conduct by administration officials."

The memo goes on to map out a partisan strategy of getting information that could then be used to launch an "independent-counsel investigation." Even the timing is plotted: It needs to break open at the most damaging time, "probably next year," during the 2004 presidential election. This detail clearly means that the Democrats' intent in their work on the committee is not to improve the operation, quality or techniques of U.S. intelligence gathering but simply to use the investigation as a ruse to release any embarrassing items to the press for partisan political advantage. That's sick. If a Republican had written that memo, he would have been drummed out of any position of power.

Immediately after the memo was leaked, the committee chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), halted the hearings and subsequently launched an investigation to discover the memo's author. It was soon discovered through a sheepish confession made to Roberts that none other than Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the committee, had ordered his staff to prepare "options" that led to the creation of this clumsy memo.

Even some Democrats are upset at the power grab implied by the memo. Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), for example, said, "If this is not treasonous, it's the first cousin of treason. This is one of those committees that you should never, ever have anything politicized, because you're dealing with the lives of ours soldiers and our citizens." Amen, Miller.

Unfortunately, this honorable senator and U.S. Marine Corps veteran is retiring at the end of his current term, and his departure will leave behind only a group of vipers hissing in a snake pit. Will the last honest Democratic senator, when leaving the nation's capital, please turn the lights off?

The memo goes on to suggest that the Democrats have had "some success" in getting Roberts to go along with their goals of having the committee "look into the activities" of senior Bush administration officials.

"The fact that the chairman supports our investigations . . . is helpful and potentially crucial," the memo boasts.

But the memo says that such cooperation alone is not enough and suggests that Democrats "take full advantage" of committee rules to, "among other things, castigate the majority for seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry."

Once Democrats have "exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority," the memo adds, "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 to do so will probably be next year," during the presidential elections, the document reads.

"Intelligence issues are clearly secondary to the public's concern regarding the insurgency in Iraq," it continues. "Yet, we have an important role to play in revealing the misleading -- if not flagrantly dishonest -- methods and motives of the senior administration officials who made the case for a unilateral, preemptive war. The approach outlined above seems to offer the best prospect for exposing the administration's dubious motives."

Roberts kept his cool when he learned of the memo, but he was clearly upset that the Democratic plan was meant to, as he put it, "discredit the committee's work and undermine its conclusions . . . before those conclusions are even reached." Apparently, the message that becomes clear is that Democrats sit on the Intelligence Committee only as proxies of the Democratic National Committee and its primary goal of getting a Democrat in the White House next year.

If there is no trust between committee members on the Intelligence Committee, how can its important work proceed? The primary goal should be to improve the nation's security through the use of intelligence, not to gain poll points for their favored partisan candidate. This Demo memo has seriously poisoned the well, to the detriment of all Americans.

Memos, Memos

This memo was not a fluke. The Democrats must have taken a page out of the classic Chinese military-strategy manual of Sun Tsu, "The Art of War." This book advises, in relevant part, "Hoodwink the enemy, so that he may be remiss and leisurely while you are dashing along with utmost speed." In other words, victory must prevail at all costs, and let honor, statesmanship and the public be damned.

Earlier this year, a group of leaked memos uncovered Democratic duplicity and complicity in the obstruction of the confirmation of several of President Bush's key judicial nominations. The targets of the attack were Judges Caroline Kuhl, nominated for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Priscilla Owen and Charles Pickering, prospective members of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The principal target of this manipulation, Miguel Estrada of the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals, finally withdrew his nomination several months ago after waiting nearly two years on a confirmation vote. In Estrada's case, as revealed in a Nov. 7, 2001, memo to Sen. Richard Durban (D-Ill.), "various civil rights groups" opposed Estrada's nomination because "he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment." ("Minimal paper trail" is a code phrase that means the senators have no legitimate basis to knock the nominee out of the running for the heinous crime of holding conservative views.) So the Dems had no rational alternative but to filibuster the nomination, a procedure that effectively allows the minority to control the majority.

These are the same "civil rights groups" that later wrote in a memo to Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) Feb. 4, 2003, expressing the opinion that Estrada could not be allowed confirmation, because "we can't repeat the mistakes we made with Clarence Thomas." Discouraging the elevation of minority conservatives is evidently what Democrats understand the constitutionally mandated "advise and consent" powers to mean. Read these memos to see how the Senate Dems really work behind the scenes and out of the light of day.

An earlier memo, again to Kennedy, this time on April 17, 2002, recites the desires of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for nominees to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Michigan. The memo, written by Elaine Jones of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, states the organization's position: "[The NAACP] would like the [Senate Judiciary] Committee to hold off on any Sixth Circuit nominees until the end of the University of Michigan case regarding the constitutionality of affirmative action in higher education is decided by the . . . Sixth Circuit."

The NAACP feared that "if a new judge with conservative views is confirmed before the case is decided, that new judge will be able to . . . review the case and vote on it." As if right on cue, Judge Julia Scott Gibbons' confirmation vote was indeed delayed by several months just to garner a verdict favorable to the NAACP, without any potential interference from a new, "conservative" justice. Does the business of the American people take a back seat to pressure from leftist special-interest groups working behind closed doors? For Democrats, you bet it does. The proof, after all, is in the memo. [End]

Adam Sparks is a San Francisco writer. He can be reached at adamstyle@aol.com.

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