As long as Pat Roberts is chairman of the Senate Select Committeee on Intelligence, we may never see Phase II of the investigation into the pre-Iraq war intelligence. Spencer Ackerman, who has written extensively on the Iraq war and the pre-war intelligence fiasco for The New Republic, writes for TPMmuckraker about Pat Robertsâ disastrous tenure as the chairman of the committee, and Robertsâ fondness for running in circles:
âPat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sprinted off the blocks in early 2005. The very picture of an energetic committee chairman, he explained with a glimmer of excitement in his eye what his agenda for the next congressional session would be during a March 2005 speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center. In the cards was vigorous committee oversight during the ongoing intelligence-community restructuring, as the CIA’s role diminished and a new Director of National Intelligence arrived. Not in the cards, Roberts explained only in response to a question, was the committee’s long-awaited report into the Bush administration’s shaping of prewar Iraq intelligence.
Not even last November’s Democratic shutdown of the Senate has managed to pry the report out of Roberts, and committee insiders aren’t hopeful that anything will change. A particular bone of contention is what the committee should say about Douglas Feith’s famous Pentagon intelligence operation, which sought to highlight mostly-illusory links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Frustration has grown to the point where the Democratic Policy Committee (DPC) took matters into its own hands last month, holding its own hearing with former Colin Powell aide Larry Wilkerson and ex-CIA Mideast official Paul Pillar–much to the applause of DPC member Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the intelligence committee herself.
But if Roberts isn’t eager to complete the so-called “Phase II” report on Iraq intelligence, how’s he doing on his beloved agenda of shaping intelligence reform? Not so well. On Monday, Roberts’ pit bull of a staff director, Bill Duhnke, defected to the Banking Committee, chaired by his old intel-committee boss, Senator Richard Shelby. It’s easy to understand Duhnke’s need for a change of pace. The committee has been laughably inactive on intelligence reform, impotent in the face of mass CIA staff hemorrhages under now-ex-Director Porter Goss, and, despite Roberts’s grumblings, unable to avert the flow of resources into short-term intelligence analysis, at the expense of longer-term foresight. All too predictably, Roberts has spent most of his time as chairman this year running interference for Bush on his illegal warrantless surveillance program, huffing at The New York Times for breaking the story and holding closed-door hearings about leaks, rather than investigating the controversial programs themselves. And don’t expect much to change while Roberts is chairman: reflecting his satisfaction with his own intransigence, Roberts has replaced Duhnke with Duhnke’s deputy, Jim Hensler, who didn’t return Muckraker’s calls. Apparently, it’s easy to sprint when you don’t plan on actually going anywhere.â
