The reason: With an influx of casualties from Iraq, the existing cemetery at Fort Riley is now full. Well, not entirely full: A spokesman for the facility tells Reuters that bodies can be buried on top of other bodies if family members want to share plots.

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As we noted Wednesday, it's not clear that Gonzales will be spending too much more time on Capitol Hill; at least one senator says that, given the attorney general's evasive answers in previous performances, there may not be much point in asking him to testify again. But that doesn't mean there aren't questions to be answered, and the list of them just keeps getting longer. Among the latest:

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The response from Cheney's office: "The vice president believes Senator Roberts was a good chairman of the Intelligence Committee." The response from Roberts' office: The delays were all the Democrats' fault.

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You remember this one.

Back in February 2004, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts agreed that his committee would investigate allegations that the intelligence community failed on Iraq as well as claims that the Bush administration misused or manipulated the intelligence it received. The catch? Roberts demanded that the second half of the probe -- the part that focused on what the White House did -- be put off until after the 2004 presidential election. After that election -- after what George W. Bush called the "accountability moment" on Iraq -- Roberts declared that there was no need to proceed with the second part of the probe at all. "I don't think there should be any doubt that we have now heard it all regarding prewar intelligence," he said. "I think that it would be a monumental waste of time to replow this ground any further."

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In a 2004 interview Michael Moore's producers filmed but didn't use in "Farenheit 9/11," Goss said: "I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified." Goss said that he lacked the "cultural background" and "technical skills" the agency now requires.

Goss was hardly more reassuring once he got the director's job. In a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library last March, Goss said: "The jobs I'm being asked to do, the five hats that I wear, are too much for this mortal."

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If this sounds a little familiar, that's because it is.

In February 2004, Roberts, a Republican, agreed that his committee would investigate not just the failures in intelligence gathering on Iraq but also the ways in which the Bush administration may have misused or manipulated the intelligence it received. But as a condition of his agreement, Roberts insisted that the second half of the probe -- the part aimed at the actions of the White House -- be put off until after the 2004 presidential election. Then, once that election was over, the president declared that the "accountability moment" on Iraq had come and gone, and Roberts said that any further work on the probe would be a "monumental waste of time."

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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.

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News flash for Goss: If the Bush administration wanted to keep its secret surveillance secret, it could have done so by using the secretive court Congress established for exactly that purpose. Congress created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. If the administration had cause to engage in the surveillance of phone calls -- if it wanted to listen in on people in the United States who were "talking to al-Qaida" -- all it had to do was get a warrant from that court, and it was entitled to do so in such a shroud of secrecy that even those prosecuted as a result of such surveillance usually aren't entitled to learn anything about the process.

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"After months and months and months of begging, cajoling and writing letters, we're finally going to have Phase II of the investigation into how the intelligence was used to lead us into this intractable war in Iraq," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said a few minutes ago.

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The panel's Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, will pivot off the report in a news conference Friday morning to argue that Democratic demands for a "Phase 2" of the investigation examining the administration's decision to invade Iraq are "null and void," as a spokeswoman for the senator put it earlier this week. But Senate Democrats laid the groundwork for their own political defeat in February when they agreed to delay the second phase of the investigation until after the November election.

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