Posted on 11/09/2003 7:32:06 AM PST by William McKinley
The uproar over a leaked strategy memo for Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee appears to be much ado over nothing.
Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, said the memo "lays bare what we've started to see for some time: an orchestrated effort by Democrats at a time of war to improperly use an intelligence investigation as a weapon against President Bush."
Even some Democrats are criticizing the memo, prepared by a staffer for Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the Intelligence Committee's co- chair, but not distributed.
"If what has happened here is not treason, it is its first cousin," said Georgia Sen. Zell Miller, a conservative Democrat.
A reading of the entire memo, though, reveals something far short of treason.
The heart of the memo is this summary:
"Intelligence issues are clearly secondary to the public's concern regarding the insurgency in Iraq. Yet we have an important role to play in revealing the misleading, if not flagrantly dishonest, methods and motives of senior administration officials who made the case for unilateral pre-emptive war."
Critics almost invariably leave out that second sentence when quoting the memo.
The American public deserves to find out if the administration distorted, exaggerated or made up evidence in order to justify the war with Iraq. This memo lays out a strategy for getting at that truth.
That is not treason. As the loyal opposition, Democrats have a responsibility and a duty to ensure that Republicans don't stall, obfuscate or cover up this investigation.
"Exploring or asserting the rights of the minority under the intelligence committee rules in no way amounts to politicizing intelligence," Rockefeller said. "The American people deserve a full accounting of why we sent our sons and daughters into war."
It is possible, of course, to read political motivations into the memo, especially a line that says the best time for Democrats to launch an independent investigation "will probably be next year."
The Washington Times framed that suggestion this way: "The memo suggested that the best time to 'pull the trigger on an independent investigation' of the Bush administration would be next year, when the president will be campaigning for re-election."
But, in fact, the memo makes no mention of Bush's re-election campaign. Instead the timing is related to the release of an interim report by the full Intelligence Committee or the identification of solid leads the Republican majority declines to pursue.
Rockefeller questioned whether Republican outrage was genuine. "Has it been created, or is it really a rift?" Mr. Rockefeller said in the Washington Times. "There are created rifts and there are rifts, and I'm not sure which category this falls into."
There are no startling revelations in this memo. The outlined strategy certainly doesn't justify the histrionics it has generated. Ideally, both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate committee would drop the partisan maneuvering and focus on developing a bipartisan strategy for fulfilling their constitutional duty to oversee the actions of the executive branch. To do anything less would be un-American.
Its sort of the clinton exemption, we don't expect anything more (or less) from them.
On the contrary, this just shows that their minds were made up prior to examination of the intelligence. This second sentence is illustrative of the depths they will sink to endanger our troops and smear an honest man.
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