Free Pass From Congress

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Registered: 04-16-2003
Free Pass From Congress
3
Tue, 07-06-2004 - 12:42pm
By Henry A. Waxman

Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page A19

In the past four years there has been an abrupt reversal in Congress's approach to oversight.

During the Clinton administration, Congress spent millions of tax dollars probing alleged White House wrongdoing. There was no accusation too minor to explore, no demand on the administration too intrusive to make.

Republicans investigated whether the Clinton administration sold burial plots in Arlington National Cemetery for campaign contributions. They examined whether the White House doctored videotapes of coffees attended by President Clinton. They spent two years investigating who hired Craig Livingstone, the former director of the White House security office. And they looked at whether President Clinton designated coal-rich land in Utah as a national monument because political donors with Indonesian coal interests might benefit from reductions in U.S. coal production.

Committees requested and received communications between Clinton and his close advisers, notes of conversations between Clinton and a foreign head of state, internal e-mails from the office of the vice president, and more than 100 sets of FBI interview summaries. Dozens of top Clinton officials, including several White House chiefs of staff and White House counsels, testified before Congress. The Clinton administration provided to Congress more than a million pages of documents in response to investigative inquiries.

At one point the House even created a select committee to investigate whether the Clinton administration sold national security secrets to China, diverting attention from Osama bin Laden and other real threats facing our nation.

When President Clinton was in office, Congress exercised its oversight powers with no sense of proportionality. But oversight of the Bush administration has been even worse: With few exceptions, Congress has abdicated oversight responsibility altogether.

Republican Rep. Ray LaHood aptly characterized recent congressional oversight of the administration: "Our party controls the levers of government. We're not about to go out and look beneath a bunch of rocks to try to cause heartburn."

Republican leaders in Congress have refused to investigate who exposed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose identity was leaked after her husband, Joe Wilson, challenged the administration's claims that Iraq sought nuclear weapons. They have held virtually no public hearings on the hundreds of misleading claims made by administration officials about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda.

They have failed to probe allegations that administration officials misled Congress about the costs of the Medicare prescription drug bill. And they have ignored the ethical lapses of administration officials, such as the senior Medicare official who negotiated future employment representing drug companies while drafting the prescription drug bill.

The House is even refusing to investigate the horrific Iraq prison abuses. One Republican chairman argued, "America's reputation has been dealt a serious blow around the world by the actions of a select few. The last thing our nation needs now is for others to enflame this hatred by providing fodder and sound bites for our enemies."

Compare the following: Republicans in the House took more than 140 hours of testimony to investigate whether the Clinton White House misused its holiday card database but less than five hours of testimony regarding how the Bush administration treated Iraqi detainees.

There is a simple but deplorable principle at work. In both the Clinton and Bush eras, oversight has been driven by raw partisanship. Congressional leaders have vacillated between the extremes of abusing their investigative powers and ignoring them, depending on the party affiliation of the president.

Our nation needs a more balanced approach. Congressional oversight is essential to our constitutional system of checks and balances. Excessive oversight distracts and diminishes the executive branch. But absence of oversight invites corruption and mistakes. The Founders correctly perceived that concentration of power leads to abuse of power if unchecked.

The congressional leadership is wrong to think that its current hands-off approach protects President Bush. In fact, it has backfired, causing even more harm than the overzealous pursuit of President Clinton. Lack of accountability has contributed to a series of phenomenal misjudgments that have damaged Bush, imperiled our international standing and saddled our nation with mounting debts.

Asking tough questions is never easy, especially if one party controls both Congress and the White House, but avoiding them is no answer. Evenhanded oversight is not unpatriotic; it's Congress's constitutional obligation.

The writer is a Democratic representative from California and ranking minority member of the principal House oversight committee.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29810-2004Jul5.html

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Tue, 07-06-2004 - 3:30pm

Good article.

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Tue, 07-06-2004 - 4:06pm
<<"Don't criticize anything this admin. does, 'cause it makes the country look bad or it empowers the enemy.>>

This is the most unpatriotic of ideas. It is just another way for him to deflect, distort and deny responsibility for his attacks. And so many believe him.

<>

Moore is probably laughing all the way to the bank. He stirred people up and that's what he wanted and the Democrats needed. I was watching Kerry's speach this am, but they cut away to continue with other news. I was so angry, after listening to all they time they give Bush. It sounded like a good speach.

<>

If Bush looses the election all evidence will disappear. This is his pattern--unless people have the sense to remove documents prior to the shredder. There is a war going on between the CIA and the administration.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Tue, 07-06-2004 - 4:35pm

>"There is a war going on between the CIA and the administration."<


I read this article earlier this morning.........


C.I.A. Held Back Iraqi Arms Data, Officials Say.


WASHINGTON, July 5 — The Central Intelligence Agency was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the C.I.A. failed to give that information to President Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials.


The existence of a secret prewar C.I.A. operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists — and the agency's failure to give their statements to the president and other policymakers — has been uncovered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The panel has been investigating the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons and plans to release a wide-ranging report this week on the first phase of its inquiry. The report is expected to contain a scathing indictment of the C.I.A. and its leaders for failing to recognize that the evidence they had collected did not justify their assessment that Mr. Hussein had illicit weapons.


C.I.A. officials, saying that only a handful of relatives made claims that the weapons programs were dead, play down the significance of the information collected in the secret debriefing operation. That operation is one of a number of significant disclosures by the Senate investigation. The Senate report, intelligence officials say, concludes that the agency and the rest of the intelligence community did a poor job of collecting information about the status of Iraq's weapons programs, and that analysts at the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies did an even worse job of writing reports that accurately reflected the information they had.


Among the many problems that contributed to the committee's harsh assessment of the C.I.A.'s prewar performance were instances in which analysts may have misrepresented information, writing reports that distorted evidence in order to bolster their case that Iraq did have chemical, biological and nuclear programs, according to government officials. The Senate found, for example, that an Iraqi defector who supposedly provided evidence of the existence of a biological weapons program had actually said he did not know of any such program.


In another case concerning whether a shipment of aluminum tubes seized on its way to Iraq was evidence that Baghdad was trying to build a nuclear bomb, the Senate panel raised questions about whether the C.I.A. had become an advocate, rather than an objective observer, and selectively sought to prove that the tubes were for a nuclear weapons program.


While the Senate panel has concluded that C.I.A. analysts and other intelligence officials overstated the case that Iraq had illicit weapons, the committee has not found any evidence that the analysts changed their reports as a result of political pressure from the White House, according to officials familiar with the report.


The Senate report is expected to criticize both the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, and his deputy, John McLaughlin, and other senior C.I.A. officials, for the way they managed the agency before the war. Mr. Tenet has announced his resignation, effective July 11, and Mr. McLaughlin will serve as acting director until a permanent director is appointed. The C.I.A. has scheduled a farewell ceremony for Mr. Tenet on Thursday, just as the reverberations from the Senate report are likely to be hitting the agency.


The possibility that Mr. Tenet personally overstated the evidence has been investigated by the Senate panel, officials said. He was interviewed privately by the panel recently, and was asked whether he told President Bush that the case for the existence of Iraq's unconventional weapons was a "slam dunk."


In his book about the Bush administration's planning for the war in Iraq, "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward reported that Mr. Tenet reassured Mr. Bush about the evidence of the existence of Iraq's illicit weapons after Mr. Bush had made clear he was unimpressed by the evidence presented to him in a December 2002 briefing by Mr. McLaughlin. "It's a slam-dunk case!" Mr. Tenet is quoted as telling the president.


In his private interview with the Senate panel, Mr. Tenet refused to say whether he had used the "slam-dunk" phrase, arguing that his conversations with the president were privileged, officials said.


In hindsight, the Senate panel and many other intelligence officials now agree that there was little effort within the American intelligence community before the war to question the basic assumption that Mr. Hussein was still seeking to produce illicit weapons. Evidence that fit that assumption was embraced; evidence to the contrary was ignored or seen as part of a clever Iraqi disinformation campaign.


More pages.............


 


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