Okay, let me get this straight.
The Senate Intelligence Committee wants George Tenet, the head of the CIA, to come visit them.
Tenet lets the Senate know a week in advance that he already has a meeting scheduled in that time slot with the President (his boss, btw), briefing other Congresscritters on Iraq, and he’s going to be at another Congressional security meeting later in the day when he will cover this same material.
And this is considered a snub by the Senators. “I hope we aren’t seeing some schoolyard level of petulance,” by the C.I.A., one Congressional official said.
Petulance.
Oh, and what they want to hear is how what the CIA has planned may mesh into the overall Bush strategy on Iraq. Not what the plans are, mind you, which is their purview, but the overall Bush strategy, what the CIA is doing to further it, and, incidentally, what they think of it.
The agency rejected the committee’s request for a report. After the rejection, Congressional leaders accused the administration of not providing the information out of fear of revealing divisions among the State Department, C.I.A., Pentagon and other agencies over the Bush administration’s Iraq strategy.
Government officials said that the agency’s response also strongly suggested that Mr. Bush had already made important decisions on how to use the C.I.A. in a potential war with Iraq. One senior government official said it appeared that the C.I.A. did not want to issue an assessment of the Bush strategy that might appear to be “second-guessing” of the president’s plans.
I’m not sure that fishing for divisions in the Administration is what the Senate Intelligence Committee is actually tasked to do, or what the CIA is compelled to talk about.
Is the CIA (or the Administration) being fully forthcoming about its plans, internal debates, and the like? Certainly not. Nor, should it be noted, are the Congressfolk being fully forthcoming about their motivations and agenda in the info they’re seeking.
(via Doyce)