Lynch and Capuano Talk About Hearings

Massachusetts Congressmen Mike Capuano and Stephen Lynch were both on Greater Boston with Emily Rooney tonight talking about the Iraq war. In case WGBH doesn't archive the conversation on the web, or you can't catch the rebroadcast, here's a portion of the interview that I think underscores the need to take back the House in 2006 if we ever hope to get to the bottom of how the administration got the pre-war intelligence so wrong. I've bolded the portions I think are important.

Congressman Stephen Lynch: Now we're finding out that maybe the president, or maybe someone in the administration actually did cook the evidence, and if Cheney has a problem with people doubting whether that was the case, they should have hearings. We've had five requests, the Government Reform Committee, to have a full investigation and open hearings on whether the intelligence was cooked, whether it was falsified and delivered to Congress. They've refused to allow us to have those hearings on five separate occasions. This is the same Republican leadership that spent 140 hours in hearings and testimony and interrogatories and taking evidence on whether President Clinton violated his Christmas Card privileges.

Emily Rooney: Do you think this might be the end result, though, of [the Fitzgerald investigation?] Might that go to the next level?

SL: We think so.

Congressman Michael Capuano: I hope he's right. I think not. Not until the House changes, because to have House hearings it has to come from leadership. If it's going to be hearings from the outside, that's a different story.

SL: Well, you can also go into executive session, where the press is not included. But members of Congress who are charged with this oversight can have those answers directly from the individuals involved. They're blocking us at every turn.

MC: That has to be approved by the majority, by the leadership. And the leadership right now is run by the Republicans. I don't know, but I don't think they're ever going to let the President be investigated on this issue as long as they run the House.

ER: Why is this so partisan? Why can't everybody look at this the same way and say if we had bad data -- no one's saying, well some people are, that it's intentional, that this evidence was gathered intentionally to drag us into a war. No one really believes that we wanted to go over there and do this.

MC: Don't say no one. <laughs>

ER: Well, that's conspiratorial to think that you would just want to do that without good evidence, so why not do an investigation?

MC: I happen to believe that there are two ways to lie. There is a lie of commission, where you overtly lie. There is another lie of omission, by not telling you the full truth. I happen to believe -- now again, I would love to get more evidence, but as I stand here today without having the full evidence, I suspect that we had a lie of omission. So I think it's pretty serious stuff. I would love to have hearings on this. And for the sake of America, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong. But we're not going to get those hearings. I don't think we're going to get those hearings either in executive session or in public. I hope I'm wrong. I hope that next week we go back or two weeks from now and all of a sudden the Republican leadership says "You know what, we're going have those hearings and we're going to open this up and we're going to do this right." If that happens, then I'll let the chips fall where they may.

SL: I think there's a benefit in just making clear to the American people that we have not had these hearings. We haven't asked these questions, so that if they want to continue to obstruct that -- and I think the American people are owed an answer on this -- if we just keep pushing on this... I think it's a disgrace that it hasn't happened already, but I think that just because they're going to say no it doesn't stand that we shouldn't ask those hard questions.

On that note, last week, I saw Al Franken speak in Cambridge, and he suggested that the Democrats' 2006 motto should be "Subpoena Power". I think there's something to that, particularly in terms of getting out the Democratic base, and convincing Independents that it's the Republicans who are obstructing investigations, preferring to protect the President and their buddies rather than trying to find out the facts about our intelligence failures. Even Rumsfeld has admitted that the pre-war intelligence was wrong, and if Democrats can convince the public that it's worthwhile to try to figure out why, they may get a chance at taking back the House or the Senate next year.