More on the Senate’s Intelligence Committee's Democratic staff plan to politicize intelligence information that I posted about here.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R. Tenn.), said Wednesday that
“he no longer believes Democrat members who sanctioned the partisan misuse of committee resources can be trusted with foreign intelligence secrets.”Senator Pat Roberts (R. Kansas), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, concludes that the Democrats on the Committee
"have decided to put partisanship ahead of our nation's security in this matter."Roberts bemoans the Democrats' destruction of the Committee's thirty year history of nonpartisan oversight. In this article in the Washington Post Chairman Roberts writes:
A memo written by the committee's Democratic staff, revealed in the press last week, makes clear that the minority's goal is to prejudge and use the committee's review and what the memo describes as "vague notions regarding the use of intelligence" to "castigate" the Republican members of the committee and conduct a partisan attack on the president.Read the whole thing.
If we give in to the temptation to exploit our good offices for political gain, we cannot expect our intelligence professionals to entrust us with our nation's most sensitive information. You can be sure that foreign intelligence services will stop cooperating with our intelligence agencies the first time they see their secrets appear in our media.
My predecessors had the wisdom and foresight to create a committee intended to be above partisan politics so it could be an effective and credible watchdog. It is now apparent that the Democrats planned to undermine the integrity of the committee by conducting a partisan attack, which threatens to destroy the credibility of an institution that has served the U.S. Senate and the nation well for nearly 30 years.
Why isn’t the traditional media expressing outrage about what Senator Zell Miller (D, Georgia), called treason’s first cousin? Hugh Hewitt offers this explanation in the Weekly Standard:
The Democratic memo reveals that much of what the media has been focusing on for the past six months has been a set-up job. The staff and Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have been selling story after story (think the Niger yellowcake and "imminent" threat controversies). Out of whole cloth, they have contrived an ambiguous but ominous speculation about the Bush administration's sinister motives for invading Iraq. Now, through this one memo, they have been revealed as nothing short of cynical political operatives.They [the Committee’s Democrats staff] were on a mission to undermine the president and his administration, no matter what the intelligence showed or will show, and the senators did nothing to rein in their out-of-control staff.
The committee's Democratic members are discredited, as are their previous and future attacks on the president. When it comes to the national security, the statements of Democratic senators simply cannot be trusted. The proof is in the memo.
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