|
Rebuffed by Rice, Hadley, House panel tracks down witnesses for Iraq probe |
|
By Helen Fessenden
|
|
Posted: 06/19/07 07:13 PM [ET] |
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s probe into prewar intelligence has again postponed a hearing, scheduled for today, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who refuses to testify publicly despite a panel subpoena.
The panel has also had no luck in securing a closed-door deposition of National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. As Rice’s deputy at the National Security Council during President Bush’s first term, Hadley was central in the controversy over the flawed claim in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa.
The panel has taken a closed-door deposition from George Tenet, former head of the CIA, who was also scheduled to testify today, and other former officials, including his former deputy, John McLaughlin. But the impasse with Rice and Hadley suggests that the administration will not budge in prohibiting senior officials to testify.
Barring a congressional vote invoking contempt, the committee effectively has no other formal tool to compel Rice to testify.
One Democrat on the panel, Carolyn Maloney (N.Y.), believes the probe should go beyond its focus on senior aides and instead find out why the forged documents behind the uranium claim were not debunked until shortly before the war, and how they came into existence in late 2001 in the first place.
In February 2002, the Italian intelligence service sent a verbatim copy of the text, in French, to the CIA, where it was not widely circulated. The actual documents did not come into the U.S. intelligence community’s possession until the following October, after an Italian businessman, Rocco Martino, gave them to a Milan-based journalist who then passed the documents along to U.S. officials. The CIA handed them over in February 2003 to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which promptly deemed them forgeries.
“I’d really like to talk to Martino,” said Maloney. “Why did he do the forgeries, and just as important, who paid him to do it?”
Maloney said she has discussed the matter informally with panel Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). But Waxman said he prefers to take “a narrower perspective.”
“We’re not looking at the broad issue of intelligence failure,” Waxman told The Hill. “Martino would be interesting, but we’re more interested in finding out why the CIA let this information get in.”
On that front, the committee’s staff conducted a phone interview in early June with another CIA official, Alan Foley, who negotiated the uranium language in Bush’s speech with Hadley aide Robert Joseph. Tenet had told Hadley in October 2002 to take out similar language in another presidential speech, but Joseph and Hadley sought to include the claim three months later. Foley has claimed he was not aware of Tenet’s previous objections, and Tenet has said he did not read the final draft of the January speech because he didn’t know it would include the uranium claim.
In letters sent to Rice and Tenet last week, Waxman wrote that the panel has interviewed and conducted depositions with other former officials such as Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Carl Ford, former assistant secretary of state for Intelligence and Research. More interviews are expected over the coming weeks, the letters noted, and “the CIA and State Department have begun to provide important documents to the Committee.”
Waxman told The Hill that the panel still intends to hold a public hearing with Rice at a still-undetermined date, adding that the information from Tenet and others will help make the committee’s questions “more pointed.” He also said that the panel will also issue a report, but “that’s a ways off.”
Neither Rice nor Hadley intend to testify before the panel “as long as it has to do with their roles as advisers to the president,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. |
