Reid takes on stonewalling GOP
Forcing examination of White House is good for the country.
Last update: November 2, 2005 at 6:13 PM
Letter of the day: Comparing Patrick Fitzgerald to Ken Starr
What a guy is Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. He did exactly what he needed to do to get the Senate to investigate the Bush administration's manipulation of intelligence in making a case for war with Iraq. Now Reid and his colleagues -- including Republicans who put loyalty to country over loyalty to the White House -- must work to ensure that investigation is comprehensive.
Forcing the Senate into secret session on Tuesday was a brilliant stroke on many levels. Most of those are political, but the central question of how the White House made and defended a bogus case for war is an issue of paramount nonpolitical importance to the nation. Were it Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., holding a Democratic administration's feet to the fire in similar circumstances, it would be just as praiseworthy.
It is well established that the case for war put forth by the Bush administration was full of holes. When that became apparent back in 2003, Senate Democrats wanted a broad investigation of the intelligence behind those claims and its use by the administration. In a wholesale surrender of the Senate's oversight responsibilities, the Republican majority decided it wanted no part of that.
To get any investigation, Democrats had to agree to split it into two phases: The first, an examination of the intelligence prepared by the CIA and other agencies, would be finished by the summer of 2004; the second, an examination of how the Bush administration used that intelligence, would conveniently wait until after the 2004 presidential election. But even after the election, the phase-two probe went nowhere. And in phase one, which put all the blame on intelligence agencies, it has now been established that Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, withheld from Senate investigators critical documents implicating the White House.
Meanwhile, Libby was misleading special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and a federal grand jury investigating the outing of a CIA agent married to a prominent critic of the case for war. Plus, the White House was using confidentiality agreements with reporters to bog down Fitzgerald's effort. The result was that Fitzgerald's work was delayed for more than a year -- past the 2004 election -- and was partly thwarted.
What you have, then, is the White House and its Republican allies actively, and successfully to this point, working to prevent the Senate and Fitzgerald from finding the truth about how the administration built a bogus case for war and how it smeared critics of that case.
Fitzgerald is still trying to bring his case to ground, and he may yet succeed. Reid's actions Tuesday appear to have forced Senate Republican leaders finally to undertake the promised phase-two probe. Finally, finally, the Bush administration may be held accountable for taking this country to war for false reasons and working to discredit anyone who pointed that out.
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