When President Bush’s misadventure in Iraq began is steady de-evolution into civil war during his first term, the president’s team answered calls for investigations into what went wrong by delaying them whenever possible.

The White House had a more-than-willing partner in obfuscating their malfeasance in the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, R-Kansas. Roberts allowed the first part of an investigation to go through during Bush’s first term but did everything in his power to delay an investigation into the false pre-war intelligence the president used as his precepts for war.

With Sen. Roberts’ help, Bush managed to stave off the investigation into pre-war intelligence during his first term, thus helping to ensure he would get a second term.

But now, seemingly inexplicably, Sen. Roberts has turned on the White House (in as much as a rightwing lapdog can do) over the second part of the investigation:

The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee lashed out at the White House on Thursday, criticizing attempts by the Bush administration to keep secret parts of a report on the role Iraqi exiles played in building the case for war against Iraq.

[Roberts] announced Thursday that his committee had completed the first two parts of its long-delayed investigation of prewar intelligence. But he chastised the White House for efforts to classify most of the part that examines intelligence provided to the Bush administration by the Iraqi National Congress, a controversial exile group.

“I have been disappointed by this administration’s unwillingness to declassify material contained in these reports, material which I believe better informs the public, but that does not — I repeat, does not — jeopardize intelligence operations, sources and methods,” Roberts said in a statement issued Thursday.

One completed section of the Senate report is said to be a harsh critique of how information from the Iraqi exile group made its way into intelligence community reports, said people who have read the report but spoke on condition of anonymity because it is still classified.

The second section compares prewar assessments of Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs and its links to terrorism with what U.S. troops and intelligence operatives have found since the Iraq war began in March 2003.

The two parts of the report will not be made public for weeks, and neither is likely to present conclusions substantially different from past investigations into faulty prewar intelligence.