Thank You, Harry Reid (The List Senate Democrats Don’t Like)
-- Lorie Byrd
PoliPundit.com
I think I discovered one good thing that came from the stunt the Democrats in the Senate pulled earlier this week. Well, one thing in addition to making them look like fools.
Last night on Special Report with Brit Hume (which should never be missed) Mort Kondracke provided details about something that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Roberts made a brief reference to in an interview I saw earlier. What Roberts mentioned and Kondracke described in a little more detail was the spreadsheet style list of around 400 statements made by various officials regarding the threat posed by Saddam’s WMD.
The list was prepared for use in the committee’s investigation. The majority of the statements came from Bush administration officials, but a good number also came from Republican and Democrat Senators and House members. Kondracke said that the spreadsheet had detailed backup references connecting the various statements to pieces of intelligence that were available at the time. What was not included on the list was the name of the person who made each statement. Roberts and Kondracke said that Democrats on the committee were balking at doing an investigation into the various claims made without knowing who made the statements.
First, I want to make it clear that I think the person responsible for leaving the names off of that list is a genius.
Since Roberts mentioned its existence in an interview in which he said he was steamed about the stunt the Democrats pulled, I wonder if we would know about the list at all if Roberts had not had the occasion to bring it up as an example of one way the Democrats were impeding the investigation. It may have been public knowledge, but I certainly had not heard about it before then.
Obviously, as has been repeated here many times and on many other conservative blogs for the past two years, the statements made by Democrats and Republicans about the threat from Saddam’s WMD was absolutely indistinguishable until it became evident that huge stockpiles of WMD were not going to be found in Iraq. At that point, Democrats (aided by their accomplices in the MSM) started rewriting history.
Well, at least trying to rewrite it.
What could be more fair in a bipartisan investigation than to keep anonymous the names of those making the statements?
Why would the Senators need to know who made the statements to evaluate them for accuracy?
Obviously it would make it harder to find fault with a statement when it might turn out that it was made by someone in your own party, or perhaps even by you. Since most, if not all, of those who voted on the Iraq War resolution had available to them the same intelligence that the White House had, why should the statements be examined in a different light?
I really want to see this list now. Where is a good leak when you need one?
UPDATE: Actually, what I would like to see more than the list is to see the Senators have to go on the record with their thoughts about whether or not it was appropriate, knowing what we knew then, to make the various statements included on the list. I know that many of the statements made by Bill Clinton (and even Hillary for that matter) regarding Saddam’s WMD threat went farther than many of those that came from the Bush administration.
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