Sunday, December 03, 2006

Pat Roberts may leave Senate Intelligence Committee.

"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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