That Intel Report

I've been meaning for the past few days to say something about the Senate Intelligence Committee report that Fox News would have you believe totally exonerates the president, who turns out to be the victim of a CIA conspiracy.

You can read the report for yourself here.

There's no question that the CIA played a role in one of the biggest screw-ups in the history of American foreign policy, something that they'll be studying in American government seminars for decades. Nor is there any doubt that George Tenet's incomprehensibly long tenure as CIA director, whatever secret, unknowable victories it may have included, was typefied by one Bay-of-Pigs-style catastrophe after another.

There should also be no question that this report doesn't let the administration off the hook. Just because the Intelligence Committee deliberately decided to table the issue of executive branch intelligence screw-ups until after the election (a little convenient, no?) doesn't mean that they didn't happen---or even that the report that we have got doesn't include, as Sen. Rockefeller finally pointed out in his press conference, fairly damning evidence of ideological pressures applied to the interpretation of intelligence data.

I'm absolutely baffled that the Democrats on the Intel Committee just accepted Sen. Roberts' procedures for investigating these matters; maybe they figured that they would lose if they tried to put up a fight and also come off as excessively partisan. But we could have done nicely without Sen Rockefeller's cowardly, Clintonian evasion, claiming that the definitions the committee agreed to prevented them from reaching official conclusions that would place blame on the administration, but that nevertheless plenty of evidence was available for doing so.