"Critics say Roberts did the bidding of the Bush administration and dragged his feet on oversight, especially the investigations of pre-war intelligence leading to the Iraq invasion. A year ago, Democrats briefly forced a shutdown of the Senate to protest Roberts' stewardship of the investigations. Committee Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., once accused Roberts of taking "all his talking points from the White House."
Roberts' defenders say he provided appropriate, forward-looking oversight and tried to avoid airing dirty laundry that could have compromised national security. Republican committee member Christopher Bond of Missouri applauded Roberts for "working hard on a bipartisan basis to try to move forward."
"Reasonable people can disagree about whether he did a really good job or whether he saved the president's hide," said John Pike, the director of Globalsecurity.org, a nonpartisan defense research center. "But it was an unusually tough assignment. How do you balance the intelligence community's obsession with secrecy with a public that has a difficult time understanding why no one stopped Sept. 11 and why the intelligence on Iraq was so at odds with reality?""
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