"Today, committee Republicans view their mission as being not oversight ..

[understandinglife]

... but cover-up."

In February 2004, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSCI) announced that it had unanimously agreed to expand its investigation of prewar Iraq intelligence from focus on intelligence community blunders and into the more controversial area of “whether intelligence was exaggerated or misused” by U.S. government officials. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller, struck the agreement with Chairman Pat Roberts -- provided, Roberts insisted, that the probe into policy-makers’ activities wait until after the presidential election.

It’s now more than a year later, and Rockefeller is still waiting -- the Phase II report has yet to appear. What happened?

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Indeed, one source told the Prospect that Roberts has worked closely behind the scenes with vice president Cheney’s office in crafting the language defining and limiting the investigation’s terms -- even though the committee is supposed to be investigating and providing oversight of the administration’s use of Iraq intelligence. Yet the committee’s leading Democrat, Rockefeller, hobbled by criticism from within the committee -- and according to one account, “a wimp … not confident of his own judgments” -- has felt constrained from pushing the majority more aggressively to comply with its promise.

Accountability may yet arrive. With press-time reports that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was homing in on a group of top White House aides for playing a role in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame to the media (in an effort to retaliate against her husband for exposing the White House's hyping of dubious Iraq intelligence) perhaps the courts will take up where Congress has failed.

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From The Report They Forgot by Laura Rozen

Much more at the link:

http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=10...

Kevin Drum has this to say about Laura Rozen's article:

THE NUKES....Laura Rozen writes about the bigger picture surrounding the smearing of Joe Wilson and the outing of Valerie Plame:

Rove and Libby weren't just telling reporters, 'Cheney doesn't know anything about Wilson's trip.' No. They created a fuller, alternative narrative: 'Cheney didn't know anything about Wilson's trip to Niger, because Wilson only got the trip as a boondoggle from his wife who works on unconventional weapons at the CIA.'

It may seem like an almost random side note that has cost them considerable trouble. But it wasn't random at all. As we know from recent reports surrounding the Fitzgerald investigation, the Vice President's office was leading an all-out propaganda war — every bit as choreographed as the pre-war propaganda campaign by the same officials — to blame the CIA for the fact that there weren't any WMD to be found in Iraq after all, and the chief stated reason for the war was collapsing. And it enlisted not just leaks to reporters about Valerie Plame to conduct that war against the CIA. It also enlisted key Republican officials in Congress....

More at the link:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/20...

And, a key item from Larry Johnson that Kevin Drum also references:

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It is now clear that Italy’s intelligence service, SISME, had a hand in producing the forged documents delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in early October 2003 that purported to show a deal with Niger to buy uranium. Many in the intelligence community are convinced that a prominent neocon with longstanding ties to SISME played a role in the forgery. The truth of that proposition remains to be proven. This much is certain: Either SISME or someone with ties to SISME helped forge and circulate those documents, which some tried to use to bolster the case to go to war with Iraq.

Although some in the intelligence community, specifically analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Energy, believed the report, the intelligence community as a whole did not put much stock in the reports and forged documents, and repeatedly told policy makers that these reports were not reliable. Yet the Bush administration ignored the intelligence community on these questions, and senior policymakers—like Vice President Cheney—persisted in trying to make the fraudulent case.

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Notwithstanding repeated efforts by intelligence analysts to downplay these intelligence reports as unreliable, DOD officials fanned the flames. This, my friends, is one example of “cooking intelligence.” These facts further expose as farce the Bush administration’s effort to blame the CIA for the misadventure in Iraq. We did not go to war in Iraq primarily because of bad intelligence and bad analysis by the CIA. The Bush administration started a war of choice.

While CIA did make mistakes, and while some key members of the National Intelligence Council were willing to drink the neocon Kool-Aid and go along with the White House, when it came to questions of whether Iraq was buying uranium in Niger or if Saddam was working with bin Laden, CIA and INR analysts consistently got it right and told the administration what they did not want to hear. It was policymakers, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, NSC Chief Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who ignored what the analysts were saying and writing.

The evidence of the White House effort to manipulate and shape U.S. public opinion is now overwhelming.

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From Dick Cheney's Covert Action by Larry Johnson on October 19, 2005

Link:

http://www.tompaine.com/print/dick_cheneys_covert_actio...

Related DU Link:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

My opinion is that many folk in the blogosphere not only know most of the critical facts, they've been writing about them since way before March 19, 2003.

Maybe we should just tell Pat Roberts that we'll all get together and write his report for him; at least then it might bear some resemblance to the truth.


Peace.

[Metta]

1. Their mission is taking ownership, of society and its resources.

They've said as much themselves.

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. Everybody knows that an investigation of pre-Iraq events

would immediately implicate the whole bush cabal in a massive fraud scheme. I think that's why they are not doing the investigation at this time.

After all, we can't let that happen with all those boys in "harms way" in Iraq, war time you know.

[AndyTiedye]

3. Their Mission is Not Oversight, It is to Overlook All Republican Misdeeds