It's not too soon for Democrats to take on oversight responsibility

The election is over, the Democrats take over Congress in January, and there is absolutely no reason why Robert Gates deserves a free pass during his confirmation hearings. But it looks like he's going to get one, despite the fact that he has been known to embrace the "fix the intelligence around the policy" modus operandi that got us into Iraq in the first place:

Lawmakers from both parties seem to agree that Gates' speedy accession is owed to a key qualification -- that Gates is not Donald Rumsfeld. When he announced his support for Gates recently, incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that fact is "the one thing he has going for him."

But in the rush to discharge Rumsfeld, the Senate may not fully explore a blemish in Gates' dossier that seems particularly relevant now. A close examination of Gates' record, including little-known documents obtained by Salon from the National Security Archive, shows that as Gates was rising through the echelons of the CIA in the late 1980s to be CIA director in 1991, he was involved in the trafficking of intelligence reports that relied on compromised sources to show an exaggerated foreign threat. With the U.S. struggling for an exit strategy from Iraq and eyeing adversaries like Iran, President Bush has selected a man to head the Pentagon who was once in charge during an intelligence fiasco not unlike the one that unleashed the Iraq war.

In September 1995, CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz recommended that Gates be held accountable for his role in hyperbolic intelligence reporting on the danger posed by the Soviet Union. In those reports, the CIA relied on sources the agency knew or should have known had been under Moscow's influence, Hitz found. At that time, though, a robust Soviet threat was music to the ears of some hard-liners in Washington, and the trumped-up intelligence made it into the hands of the president and Pentagon leaders.

When confronted with Hitz's findings in 1995, Gates, who had since left the agency, deflected responsibility by pointing to his former employees' errors. In an Oct. 30, 1995, letter from Gates to then-CIA director John Deutch, Gates responded to the findings by blasting subordinates, while conceding that the flawed reports were "a serious breach of the integrity of the intelligence process." In that letter, Gates expressed his "unhappiness" with lower-level CIA officials who, in Gates' view, failed to "characterize accurately these source problems both to the CIA senior officials and to those in the policy agencies who received the intelligence reports." The letter was cosigned by two other former CIA directors also fingered by the inspector general: William Webster and James Woolsey. Deutch, who now supports Gates for secretary of defense, ultimately sided with Gates over the inspector general.

The CIA has never released the 1995 inspector general report. But in an interview, Hitz said that Gates should have been held accountable, because he was in charge. "The top guys at that period of time, in my opinion, were not held accountable for what happened on their watch," said Hitz, now a lecturer at the University of Virginia law school. "My theory is that if you are going to make sure everyone operates with integrity, you have to hold the heads of the organization responsible," he explained. "We can't have reports going forward to the president of the United States that were being fed to us by our chief enemy."

"He is not Donald Rumsfeld" is all well and good as a qualification -- but it shouldn't be the only one.