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Monday, Apr 17, 2006 1:27 PM UTC

Senate Intelligence Committee: Too busy for oversight on Iran?

Republican chairman Pat Roberts says it's all the Democrats' fault.

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Topics: Iran, War Room, Pat Roberts, R-Kan., Iraq, Middle East,

With all the scary talk about the Bush administration’s plans for Iran, we take some comfort in knowing that our elected officials in Congress are working hard to make sure that the sort of mistakes — and we’re being charitable here — that marked the road to war in Iraq don’t get repeated this time around.

Or not.

As U.S. News and World Report reports, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts says that his committee has “not made the progress on our oversight of Iran intelligence, which is critical.” A spokesman for the committee’s Republican majority says that there’s “no organized committed staff” assigned to look at Iran just yet. Roberts says it’s all the Democrats’ fault; if they weren’t so “focused on intelligence failures of the past,” he says, the committee might be out of the gate on Iran by now.

Of course, if Roberts hadn’t done everything in his power to slow down the committee investigation into the Bush administration’s misuse of intelligence on Iraq, that work might have been done years ago, and the lessons learned from it might have already sunk in on both sides of the aisle. It wasn’t, and it’s pretty clear that they haven’t.

Tim Grieve is a senior writer and the author of Salon's War Room blog. More Tim Grieve.

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