Rockefeller Charges Cheney Worked To Stall Congressional Intelligence Hearings
Uh, oh — will Vice President Dick Cheney now charge that West Virginia’s Sen. Jay Rockefeller is “out of line”? McClatchy Newspapers reports:
Vice President Dick Cheney put “constant” pressure on the Republican former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee to stall an investigation into the Bush administration’s use of flawed intelligence on Iraq, the panel’s Democratic chairman charged Thursday.In an interview with McClatchy Newspapers, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said it was “not hearsay” that Cheney, a leading proponent of invading Iraq, pushed Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., to drag out the probe.
“It was just constant,” Rockefeller said of Cheney’s alleged interference.
Cheney’s response is not surprising:
Cheney said in response to Rockefeller’s charge that he believes Sen. Roberts “was a good chairman” of the Intelligence Committee, spokeswoman Lea McBride said.
And you would think so — if he was indeed helping the Veep drag out the hearings so that information allowing the kind of oversight that Congress is supposed to do would not fall into unfriendly members of the legislative branch’s hands. AND:
Roberts’ chief of staff, Jackie Cottrell, said in an email statement it was Democrats’ fault the investigation remains incomplete more than two years after it was begun.“Senator Rockefeller’s allegations are patently untrue,” she said. “The delays came from the Democrats’ insistence that they expand the scope of the inquiry to make it a more political document going into the 2006 elections. Chairman Roberts did everything he could to accommodate their requests for further information without allowing them to distort the facts.”
True? Now we’ll see. Because now that the GOP is not in charge of the entire Congress, more and more information is going to come out about this and other matters.
Will it show the administration provided complete information to the Congress (and public)? Or will Congressional hearings yet to come — and histories by non-Weekly Standard editors yet to be written — show that the administration in general, and Cheney, in particular, has been involved in keeping information away from Congress and the public and presenting other info that has not proven to be accurate?
You also have to wonder: there have now been a variety of news reports in recent months coming out unflattering to Cheney (including some that quote people associated with Bush 41′s administration). Why are all these people (including Republicans) picking on him? Are they all conspiring with Bob Woodward and Colin Powell to distort how forthcoming he has been in office?
7 Responses to “Rockefeller Charges Cheney Worked To Stall Congressional Intelligence Hearings”
Do you mean the same Senator Jay-Rock that gave Baby Assad the December 2002 heads-up re: the coming invasion of Iraq?
Hell, Rockefeller didn’t have to give anyone a heads up on something that was so obviously going to happen anyways.
Anyone else getting the feeling Cheney isn’t going to last to Jan. ’09?
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That gang of 14 equals a 3rd party and a 5th column plus an attempt to deep 6 the Dems chances for winning the next presidential elections…
Rockefeller’s choice of words is interesting, if not bizarre: “it is not heresay to say” that Cheney pressured Roberts.
No one here seems to have noticed that Rockefeller’s claims ARE, in fact, hearsay. He says “he knows” that this pressure occurred, and that Cheney sat in on meetings. In fact – see legal definition of hearsay below – Rockefeller’s words are a precise example of “hearsay”. If he tried to make this claim in a court of law he would be sliced and diced.
Also, as the definition indication, there is good reason for this rule: we cannot know how Rockefeller knows what he is saying. It is like AP relying on anonymous reporting from Iraq about Sunni mosques being utterly destroyed by Shia. How can we know the truth of this? We trust AP…yet Malkin went and took pictures of the intact mosque.
That is the problem with hearsay.
I could just as equally say that I know for a fact – and this is not hearsay – that Rockefeller is a paid agent of al-Quada!
“A rule of evidence that prohibits secondhand testimony at a trial. For example, if an eyewitness to an accident later tells another person what she saw, the second person’s testimony is hearsay. The reason for this rule is that the opposing party has no ability to confront and cross-examine the person who has firsthand knowledge of the event.”
The Intelligence Committee was supposed to have oversight, ethics, but it was passed over and the issue is now just gifts.
The NSA program is a DOD program. It is not subject to courts, laws or the Department of Justice. The orders from the CIC to DOD aren’t an issue for Congress. It has always done domestic eavesdropping. The NSA charter is not going to be renewed and it will cease to exist and a court will now provide it’s function. Rockefeller’s NSA porblem is now gone and the power of the NSA, DOD, has moved out of the President’s control to Congress, which appears to be the goal. The CIA analysts have also moved to DOD/DIA and the funding control of CIA and it’s emmployees appears to controlled by Congress when they now work for DOD. More money and control leaving DOD and the President and going to Congress. This seems to be Rockefeller’s goal.
What the country needs to know and have Congress accountable for is the reason that it became an issue along with the CIA prisoner transfers and other leaks. The country went through this because someone at CIA complained about domestic survellience to the intelligence committee. All these leaks are standard intelligence work and have gone on for decades.
Congress, as usual, seemed to use all the leaks and complaints to hire more federal employees and transfer control and money to Congress. The next President, if it is a democrat, will be powerless in alot of areas that the CIC is needed. For Congress, this shouldn’t be a surprise.
The Afghaistan was funding through CIA and USAID are issues that need to be addressed. The money went to democrat ‘freinds’ of the intelligence committee and, later, the money ran out and the ‘friends’ left in a way that created an insurgency. Congressional Oversight and ethics were supposed to be the answer, but the oversight was traded down to ethics and gifts.
Komrad Marlow – We are still waiting for Phase Two from Roberts. I guess the reports on Cheney’s desk. The Wingnuts went insane when Reid pulled a parlimentry procedure to bring attention to Roberts footdragging. Where is Phase Two?