I just caught part of the “Daily Show” for the first time in probably a year; now I remember why. Tonight Jon Stewart accused the news media of ignoring the Senate Intelligence Committee Phase II report. He specifically claimed their was no coverage at Foxnews.com and CNN.com. Here’s another link you’ll probably want to ignore, Jon.

Besides incorrectly making remarks about news coverage, Stewart also falsely charged that then-Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) and the Republicans intentionally delayed the report:

“Obviously, there were some holdups, some script delays, from Republicans who didn’t want this report released to the public.”

But as the Minority Views document makes clear, the report was deliberately held up by Democrats:

“The Phase II effort has indeed resulted in a partisan exercise and requests made by the Democrats of the then-Republican Committee leadership from 2004 to 2006 for the inquiry itself and for unnecessary interviews and documents were clearly intended as roadblocks to prevent the inquiry’s completion and to allow bogus charges of “obstruction” intended to help the Democrats’ political goals. [...]

We find the refusal to include all relevant intelligence and the inclusion of information pubilshed after the delivery of statements to be particularly ironic since in a letter on November 14, 2005, then-Vice Chairman Rockefeller, along with Senators Levin and Feinstein, wrote to the Majority and Minority Leaders explaining that they had “insisted that the Committee compare statements of government officials against all intelligence information prepared for circulation and relevant to the subject matter at issue, provided it was it [sic] available at the time the statement was made.

This appeared to be considered a worthwhile task when the burden of collecting all of the available intelligence form the end of the Gulf War through the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom fell to Republican Members and their staff, but when the Democrats took charge, including only some of the intelligence was deemed acceptable. Perhaps forcing the Republican staff to review over 40,000 documents was just a request intended to delay further publication of the Phase II effort and allow the continuation of charges of “obstruction.” [...]

The only reason we can imagine why the Democrats would not undertake interviews that they had repeatedly requested in the last Congress, is that the interviews were another tactic at delaying the report and allowing more false charges of “obstruction.”

See also Senator Roberts’s Phase II fact check.

Stewart also mocks a 2005 sound bite by Sen. Roberts talking about wanting to speed it up. Obviously, Stewart rips Sen. Roberts’s statements from context:

 

—Mick Wright is a freelance journalist who lives in Memphis, Tennessee. His personal blog is at mickwright.net.