IOKIYAR, Kansas style

Murray Waas throws another high hard one: in today's NATIONAL JOURNAL: Is There A Double Standard On Leak Probes?, he points out that assclown Senator Pat Roberts, best known for his divide-and-conquer approach to stovepiping the cooked intel in the run-up to Iraq (see post earlier today), is also responsible for one of the worst secruity breaches in a decade:

(T)hree years ago on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Roberts himself was involved in disclosing sensitive intelligence information that, according to four former senior intelligence officers, impaired efforts to capture Saddam Hussein and potentially threatened the lives of Iraqis who were spying for the United States.

On March 20, 2003, at the onset of military hostilities between U.S. and Iraqi forces, Roberts said in a speech to the National Newspaper Association that he had "been in touch with our intelligence community" and that the CIA had informed President Bush and the National Security Council "of intelligence information from what we call human intelligence that indicated the location of Saddam Hussein and his leadership in a bunker in the suburbs of Baghdad."
...
After opening his speech with the information about human intelligence and Saddam Hussein's location in a Baghdad bunker, the senator said that President Bush had conferred with his top military advisers and had "authorized a pre-emptive surgical strike with 40 Tomahawk Missiles launched by ship and submarines and so called bunker bombs by F-117 stealth aircraft. I do not have a damage assessment. The Iraqi's report 14 killed and one wounded and are reporting damage in residential areas."

At the time, it was one of the most sensitive secrets in government that the CIA had recruited Iraqi nationals who claimed to have infiltrated Hussein's inner circle to be able to follow his movements at the onset of war. But after the bombs and missiles hit an Iraqi governmental complex known as Dora Park, located on the Tigris River south of Baghdad, Hussein either was not there, or escaped unharmed.

Whether or not Roberts' comments were inadvertent, former intelligence officials said, they almost certainly tipped off the Iraqi dictator that there were spies close to him. "He [Roberts] had given up that we had a penetration of [Saddam's] inner circle," says a former senior intelligence official. "It was the worst thing you could ever do."

What repercussions, if any, occurred in Baghdad as a result of Roberts' comments could not be determined, according to sources. After the missile and bombing attack on his bunker, it is possible that Hussein suspected that he had a spy or spies within his entourage, intelligence officials said. One former official said that the Iraqi dictator "very well may have thought he had been located because of electronic monitoring." Two former intelligence officials said the disclosure by Roberts may have made it more difficult to launch a second missile or bombing attack against Saddam Hussein in the early days of the war.

A spokesperson for Roberts did not respond to numerous phone messages seeking comment for this story, and did not respond to an e-mail inquiry.

A Republican congressional aide who was familiar with the March 20, 2003 speech and who spoke to Roberts about it around the time it occurred, said that Roberts' comments were a "mistake" and a "dumb act," and "not done with bad intent." The aide suggested that Roberts might have been carried away by the moment, or acted out of "self-aggrandizement."

What more do you need to know about the dysfunction and decay that define the Republican party than exactly this: that "mistakes," "dumb acts" and "self aggrandizement" are seen as exculpatory, so long as it is one of their own that is stupid or grandiose.