Posted on 11/17/2003 5:53:35 AM PST by Liz
Partisan animosity that has brought operations of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to a standstill reached new depths on Nov. 5. The committee's Democratic vice chairman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, went on Lou Dobbs' CNN program to say flatly he had not ordered the staff memorandum outlining a confrontational election year strategy on Iraq.
The Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, was startled. He told his staff that Rockefeller told him he personally ordered aides to give him ''options'' -- an order that produced the infamous memo. To the plain-spoken ex-Marine, trust had been breached. His committee will conduct no hearings until some Democrat -- preferably Rockefeller -- disavows the memo's contents. That is not about to happen.
Neither Roberts nor Rockefeller is a natural partisan brawler, and each would prefer amiable cooperation in overseeing the nation's intelligence agencies. But Rockefeller is pressured by a Senate Democratic caucus that, facing slim chances of regaining majority status any time soon, insists on undermining President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq. Roberts is unable to follow his normal inclinations to make peace.
The memo setting forth a political strategy for Intelligence Committee Democrats cannot be written off, as Democratic senators try to do, as the work of one possibly errant staffer. It represents dominant political thinking inside the committee by Michigan's Sen. Carl Levin, one of the more partisan members of the U.S. Senate.
Roberts informed nonpartisan staffers that Rockefeller had informed him he had requested ''options.'' The memo's only option actually was a plan for Democrats to ''castigate'' their Republican colleagues and ''pull the trigger'' on a 2004 independent investigation of politicized intelligence.
That is why Roberts was so disturbed by Rockefeller's Nov. 5 interview. Dobbs: ''Did you order the drafting of this memo?'' Rockefeller: ''No, I didn't.'' Dobbs: ''Do you know who did?'' Rockefeller: ''No, I mean it wasn't ordered.'' To Roberts, that effective repudiation of their private conversation ended the Intelligence Committee's tenure as a politics-free haven.
Storm clouds first appeared during the 2001-2002 interregnum of a Democratic majority when Sen. Bob Graham of Florida became chairman. He proposed that the Intelligence Committee staff for the first time be divided evenly, into majority and minority staffs. He failed. Otherwise, however, he was given a free hand by his Republican vice chairman.
After Republicans regained Senate control in the 2002 elections and term limits imposed new leadership on the Intelligence Committee, Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle insisted on an end to nonpartisanship. As the new vice chairman, Rockefeller followed the party line by demanding half the staff, which was the real cause for delayed reorganization of the Senate under GOP leadership.
On a personal basis, Roberts gets along well with Rockefeller (and bonded with him on a trip to Iraq earlier in the year). He likes the multimillionaire scion of the famous Republican family, describing Rockefeller's high-flown pronouncements as ''ethereal.'' But their relationship now is strained to the breaking point.
The partisan tone among the committee's Democrats has been sounded by Levin and his lieutenant, Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois. Levin set the line on "Fox News Sunday" on Nov. 9: ''Did the administration, knowing what they knew, with daily briefings, exaggerate the intelligence [about Iraq]? The chairman of this committee and the Republicans refuse to look at the administration's use of exaggeration of intelligence.''
The point Levin wants to pursue is that intelligence professionals were pressured by Bush officials to distort their findings. The committee's nonpartisan staff has come up with no such information and has had no such complaints from whistleblowers in the intelligence community. Democratic demands to leap over the staff produced the memo that has laid waste the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Stuff like missile technology to Communist Red China to win an election? I agree. You're sooo right.
Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of legislators taking lie detector tests.
The poll indicated fully 70% of Americans believe Democrats would leak confidential information provided to them.
Legislators should take lie detector tests. Americans need to know our lawmakers are not playing fast and loose with our national security.
If they use it on Shillary/Bubba, it's doomed.
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