Roberts blasts Senate closed session

At the center of a political firestorm, Sen. Pat Roberts said Wednesday he has seen no proof the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“I haven’t seen any (evidence) at this particular time,” said Roberts, a Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I’m not ruling it out, but I have not seen any at this date.”

His comments came in a teleconference with Kansas media one day after Senate Democrats forced the chamber into closed session, claiming Roberts had dragged his feet on a promised inquiry into whether the White House trumped up intelligence to lead the country into war.

No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq, despite being a key selling point in the administration’s case for war. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff was indicted on charges he lied about his role in political attacks on a vocal critic of the war.

“The American people still want to know now more than ever why the United States went to war, whether they were misled, and whether our intelligence was misused,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat who is vice chairman of the intelligence committee, said after Tuesday’s closed session.

He added: “Any line of questioning that has brought us too close to the White House has been thwarted.”

‘Petty public stunt’

But Roberts said he had informed Democrats earlier this week the inquiry was nearing conclusion. Tuesday’s shutdown, he said, was motivated by politics.

“They engaged yesterday in what I think is a very petty public stunt to attack all Republicans and to attack me personally for not completing all our work on” the investigation, said Roberts, still clearly angry about the situation.

Before the November 2004 presidential election, Roberts’ committee issued a 512-page report concluding that massive failures at America’s intelligence services had created the erroneous conclusion that Iraq possessed WMDs that might be used against America. But the committee decided to wait until after the election to investigate whether the Bush administration had taken the error a step further by overstating the evidence it did have.

In fact, Roberts said Wednesday, Senate Democrats on the committee had obstructed the so-called “Phase II” investigation by refusing at a May 17 meeting to compare prewar statements on Iraq made by a variety of public officials, including Democrats, with the intelligence available before the war.

After all, Roberts said, even Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton, N.Y., believed that Saddam Hussein was developing illegal weapons. So did the Russian, French and Israeli intelligence agencies.

It wasn’t just the Bush administration that made a mistake, Roberts said.

“Senators voted for regime change,” he said. “Senators voted to go to war.”

Rockefeller differs

In a statement released to the Journal-World on Wednesday afternoon, Rockefeller said his review of the committee’s May 17 meeting showed “no disagreement about how to proceed” on the investigation.

“The important fact that should be known is that no committee member has seen one page of a draft report related to the Phase II investigation into prewar intelligence,” Rockefeller said in the written statement.

That report, Roberts suggested, is unlikely to find the Bush administration pressured intelligence agencies to inflate intelligence on Iraq’s weapons capabilities.

“We interviewed 250 (intelligence) analysts,” Roberts said. “We asked them: ‘Were you ever pressured? Were you ever manipulated for any kind of political purpose?’ Answer: No.”

He said Democrats should stop “politicizing” the work of the intelligence committee.

“If my Democrat friends spent more time working on Phase II and less time playing the political cards and grandstanding, I think we can get this done,” Roberts said. “We need to get it done.”