I’m very impressed that the Wichi­ta Eagle’s edi­to­r­i­al board has a blog. Too bad it reveals they are morons.

Speak­ing of Pat Robert­s’s plan to hold hear­ings on the CIA’s use of cov­er, Philip Brown­lee writes

Some Democ­rats are accus­ing Sen. Pat Roberts, R‑Kan., of play­ing par­ti­san pol­i­tics for block­ing a con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tion of pres­i­den­tial advis­er Karl Rove’s role in leak­ing the iden­ti­ty of CIA agent Valerie Plame. But the oppo­site seems true. What appears to be a rig­or­ous Jus­tice Depart­ment inves­ti­ga­tion of the leak is still ongo­ing, and there is no press­ing rea­son for Con­gress to jump in now — oth­er than that Democ­rats want a pub­lic plat­form to dis­cred­it Rove. Besides, Rove is doing a pret­ty good job self-destruc­t­ing on his own.

The prob­lem is, Roberts is the one who wants to cre­ate the inves­ti­ga­tion! Cre­at­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion would have seri­ous con­se­quences, includ­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of immu­ni­ty to the leak­ers, lead­ing to acquit­tals just like Ollie North’s.

Democ­rats are crit­i­ciz­ing the pro­posed hear­ings as hackish. 

As I quot­ed before TPM wrote:

Sen. Roberts does­n’t have time to inves­ti­gate the manip­u­la­tion of pre­war intel­li­gence, the Niger forg­eries or the Plame disclosure.

But he does have time to inves­ti­gate how the CIA uses ‘cov­er’ in its clan­des­tine operations.

Now I’ll just quote Kevin Drum ask­ing why Roberts is sud­den­ly interested:

Is it because there’s been a rash of expo­sures of under­cov­er agents? Not that I’ve heard. Is it because he’s con­cerned about the out­ing of Valerie Plame? That hap­pened two years ago.

No, the only thing that’s hap­pened recent­ly has been the dis­clo­sure that Karl Rove did indeed men­tion Plame’s CIA sta­tus to two dif­fer­ent reporters in 2003. That has the Repub­li­can par­ty engaged in a pan­ic strick­en fren­zy to con­vince the world that Plame was­n’t real­ly covert and there­fore Rove did noth­ing wrong even if he did expose her identity.

This gives us two options to choose from. First, Roberts is gen­uine­ly offend­ed both by Rove’s actions and his fel­low Repub­li­cans’ defense of it, and intends to use his hear­ings to hold the Bush admin­is­tra­tion’s feet to the fire over it. I real­ize opin­ions may dif­fer on this, but since Roberts has nev­er held this admin­is­tra­tion’s feet to the fire over any­thing, I have my doubts that he’s sud­den­ly got­ten reli­gion in the past cou­ple of weeks. The sec­ond option is that he intends to use the hear­ings to help the admin­is­tra­tion cov­er its tracks. This is the the­o­ry I favor.

Still, this is just spec­u­la­tion. So let’s go to the tape. Alan Bjer­ga of the Wichi­ta Eagle caught up with Roberts on Wednes­day and asked him what he had in mind. Here’s what he said:

“We need to look at the role of cov­er, and how to best pro­tect peo­ple who are oper­at­ing in a covert fash­ion,” he said.

Hmmm. That does­n’t sound so bad. Maybe I’m being too harsh on Roberts. But wait — there’s also this:

Roberts said that Plame, along with sev­er­al oth­er cas­es, points to prob­lems relat­ed to how the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty pro­tects its offi­cers and to ambi­gu­i­ties in the def­i­n­i­tion of who has cov­er and what lev­els of cov­er exist.

Ah. So appar­ent­ly Roberts is main­ly con­cerned with dis­parag­ing the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty after all. Accord­ing to Bjer­ga, Roberts thinks there’s a “prob­lem” with the way they pro­tect their offi­cers. What’s more, there are “ambi­gu­i­ties” in how they define who’s under­cov­er and who isn’t. And keep in mind that this comes after Roberts’ Late Edi­tion com­ment that although out­ing a covert agent is “gener­i­cal­ly” a seri­ous mat­ter, he per­son­al­ly doubts that Valerie Plame was real­ly covert. “From a com­mon sense stand­point,” he said, “dri­ving back and forth to work to the CIA head­quar­ters, I don’t know if that real­ly qual­i­fies as being, you know, covert.”

Roberts could hard­ly be more trans­par­ent in his inten­tions if he hired a sky­writer to adver­tise them. If the CIA isn’t pro­tect­ing its offi­cers very well, and if they do a lousy job of defin­ing who’s under­cov­er and who’s mere­ly “under­cov­er” — well, then, poor old Karl Rove can hard­ly be blamed for acci­den­tal­ly step­ping over the line, can he?

When one spec­u­lates, one always runs the risk of being wrong. So maybe I’m wrong. But let’s face it: the dots are all point­ing in the same direc­tion here. Roberts is a loy­al water car­ri­er for the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and that’s what he’s doing here: car­ry­ing their water. His goal is to pro­tect the White House, not to mount seri­ous hear­ings about pro­tect­ing the CIA’s covert agents.

So, if the edi­tors read their own paper, they’d see evi­dence of our Sen­a­tor’s hackery.