Sen. Roberts seeks delay of Intel probe

By Alexander Bolton

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he wants to divide his panel’s inquiry into the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq-related intelligence into two parts, a move that would push off its most politically controversial elements to a later time.

The inquiry has dragged on for more than two years, a slow pace that prompted Democrats to force the Senate into an extraordinary closed-door session in November. Republicans then promised to speed up the probe.

Roberts said in an interview shortly before the April recess that he could bring up the matter in a business meeting of the Intelligence Committee scheduled for tomorrow.

“We went over three reports that members are studying,” Roberts said, referring to three less controversial components of his committee’s inquiry. Roberts said his committee could approve the immediate publication of those components.

“We’ll have a business meeting first thing when we come back. I’d like to show some progress,” he said.

An aide to Sen. Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.), the panel’s ranking Democrat, said that Democrats are aware Roberts is mulling a decision on whether to divide the inquiry and that Rockefeller is unlikely to oppose such a move if Roberts goes through with it. But one Democrat who has followed the probe said separating the controversial elements would relieve pressure on Roberts to complete the entire inquiry soon.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” in February, host Tim Russert asked Roberts about the status of the inquiry.

Roberts and Rockefeller have already split their review of Iraq-related intelligence once before. In February 2004, they agreed to issue a report before the upcoming election on how well the nation’s intelligence agencies assessed the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Roberts and Rockefeller further agreed to publish a report on a second phase of the inquiry to after the election. Phase two was to focus on the politically sensitive issue of the Bush administration’s handling of intelligence findings.

At the time, some Democrats grumbled that Rockefeller had let slide an issue their party could have used against Bush’s reelection campaign.

Questions about the Bush administration’s handling of pre-war intelligence have new political relevance as the midterm elections draw nearer. Public concern about the war in Iraq is considered a major reason for Bush’s low job approval rating, which, in turn, is widely viewed as harmful to congressional Republicans’ political fortunes.

“It has resonance in the following way,” said Phil Singer, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “One of the major critiques against Republican incumbents in the Senate [is that] they take a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach to the administration on a number of issues, including on the Iraq issue. To the extent the Senate Republicans continue to refuse to ask tough questions and ask for accountability, it’s going to be a political liability for them.”

Roberts would like to wrap up work quickly on three relatively less controversial topics of the second phase of the inquiry:

• Pre-war intelligence assessments of what the political and security environment would be in Iraq after the American victory.

• Post-war findings about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its links to terrorism and how they compare with prewar assessments.

• The U.S. intelligence community’s use of intelligence provided by the Iraqi National Congress.
A report on these three areas would be made separately from the most controversial aspects of the inquiry. Left unfinished would be a report on whether public statements and testimony about Iraq by senior U.S. government officials were substantiated by available intelligence information. Roberts also would leave unfinished another report on what Democrats have called possibly illegal activity in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, formerly headed by Douglas Feith, who is believed to have played an important role in persuading the president to invade Iraq.

The committee may review statements by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Democrats charged that the committee did almost nothing to evaluate the statements of public officials before November, when Democrats forced the Senate into closed session.

GOP spokespeople for Roberts and the committee did not return calls for comment.

Progress on evaluating the statements of senior Bush administration officials, as well as Democratic lawmakers, has been slow because of the massive amount of work involved. Partisan sparring over how to evaluate the statements has also slowed work.

At one point, Roberts wanted Intelligence Committee members to vote separately on scores of statements to determine whether each was justified — a proposal Democrats rejected.

Democrats also have pressed Roberts to interview government officials about their statements, something Roberts has not agreed to, although he told The Hill in November that he would conduct interviews and issue subpoenas as a last resort.

Roberts has deferred the job of looking into Feith’s role until the Department of Defense inspector general completes its own investigation of the former undersecretary’s activities.

Roberts is less than completely pleased about his committee’s focus on wrapping up phase two.

He recently complained in a U.S. News & World Report article that his committee has not made progress on overseeing intelligence on Iran, a growing national security concern, because Democrats are “more focused on intelligence failures of the past.”

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