Who's Afraid of the Senate Intelligence Committee? Senate majority leader Bill Frist threatens to restructure the Intelligence committee into an outright coverup committee. What's to explain the motivation for this (pdf) except a White House and its enablers that truly have reasons to be worried about a committee that would be exercising any pretense of intelligence oversight responsibilities?

Check out this astonishing paragraph from Frist's letter to Reid:

The inquiries currently underway, and the ones being proposed by the minority, would demand an overwhelming amount of staff time, attention and resources. Rather than conducting oversight of the intelligence community and its activities, or assessing current and future threats to the United States national security, the committee is focusing most of its activities on investigations that offer little (or no) value to the challenges our Nation faces now. [...]

I would propose that we meet with Senators Roberts and Rockefeller as soon as possible to discuss and rectify this matter. [...] If we are unable to reach agreement, I believe we must consider other options to improve the Committee's oversight capabilities, to include restructuring the Committee so that it is organized and operated like most Senate committees.

This is truly one for the history books. In a historical moment when the administration is shown to have authorized torture, ignored and manipulated intelligence for a war that it is losing, and authorized illegal warrantless domestic surveillance on US persons, the Republican heads of the Senate are trying to restructure the Congress to prevent it from investigating any of these matters. The United States Congress as a co-equal branch of government, RIP.

More from Atrios and ReddHedd.

Posted by Laura at March 4, 2006 10:22 AM