In case you missed it, veteran political observer Walter Pincus generously complimented last week to Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Brighton for his handling of the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee.
Pincus wrote that the new chairman has “shown that he is a man to be reckoned with” while maintaining a pragmatic, bipartisan approach on Capitol Hill.
Earlier this month, on a Wednesday morning, Rogers drew an unusually large crowd of some 200 people, as well as C-SPAN cameras, to a Council on Foreign Relations breakfast meeting. That afternoon, before the House Rules Committee, he laid the groundwork for debate and passage two days later of the defense authorization bill. And that Sunday he capped off the week with a substantial appearance on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
Here is a portion of what Pincus said in The Washington Post:
“Though a conservative Republican, Rogers pushes bipartisanship when it comes to intelligence (issues), something that has been missing in Congress for almost a decade. Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the intelligence panel, publicly acknowledged Rogers’ compromising with committee Democrats and the Obama administration.
“One reason may be Rogers’ varied resume, which is also politically impressive for these times. A college Army Reserve Officer Training Corps graduate, he served three years as an Army officer and five years in the FBI as a special agent assigned to Chicago, where he investigated public corruption. In 1994 he returned to Michigan and won a seat in the state Senate, becoming majority floor leader four years later.
“In 2000, when then-Congresswoman Debbie Stabenow left her 8th District House seat for the Senate, Rogers won (the vacant seat) by only 111 votes. Since then, he has won five times with fairly comfortable margins.
“But it’s Rogers’ views, expressed during his Council (on Foreign Relations) talk and in answering questions, that are worth exploring. They exhibited more thoughtful approaches to intelligence activities and their implications than one is used to hearing from Republicans during the Obama administration.
“He opened with a brief history of the intelligence communities’ ups and downs over the past decade: the post-Cold War cutbacks in people and money; the non-sharing of intelligence, particularly between the FBI and CIA; and the shrinking of risk-taking after the mid-1990s cleanout of human intelligence sources with questionable criminal and human rights records. He didn’t mention that it was then-CIA Director John Deutch who pushed penalties on agency case officers and the “cleansing” of recruited agents.
“In words that intelligence professionals understand, Rogers said, ‘Once 9/11 happened, the whole machination of who was responsible and ‘Well who do we blame’ started.’” Though he left out that the Bush White House and Congress led the critical chorus, Rogers recognized that still ‘something pretty remarkable happened’ without outside help.
“’All of our intelligence agencies realized that they weren’t prepared for what was facing them, and the integration started,’” he said.
“He’s the first member of Congress, in my mind, who has acknowledged that the first group to take steps to remedy failures leading up to Sept. 11 was the intelligence community itself. That was well before the Sept. 11 Commission and its report, and years ahead of the December 2004 passage of the statute that created the office of Director of National Intelligence.”
