Intelligence commission chiefs experienced at keeping secrets

WASHINGTON -- The men put in charge of the Iraq intelligence commission have wide experience with covert information -- one in federal courts, the other in Congress.

Laurence Silberman is a blunt conservative who oversaw the highly secretive panel of judges responsible for ruling on government wiretaps against alleged foreign terrorists and spies.

Charles Robb, a former Democratic senator and Virginia governor, brings unique experience as the only senator to sit on all three of the Senate's security committees -- Intelligence, Armed Services and Foreign Relations -- during his two terms in Washington.

President Bush created the seven-member bipartisan commission Friday. He told members to examine the apparently faulty prewar intelligence that suggested Iraq had chemical and biological weapons stockpiles and an aggressive nuclear weapons program.

The commission also will look at U.S. intelligence on past or present weapons programs in North Korea, Iran, Libya and Afghanistan.

Silberman, 68, sat until recently on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, where he served up a wholehearted endorsement of the Justice Department's legal tactics in the fight against terrorism. Civil libertarians and many Democrats say those powers are overreaching and have fought to have them rolled back.

Silberman and the other two members of the court ruled that the expanded wiretap guidelines sought by Attorney General John Ashcroft under the new USA Patriot Act law do not violate the Constitution.

The special review court ordered the lower court to issue a new ruling giving the government the powers it was seeking.

The decision "revolutionizes our ability to investigate terrorists and prosecute terrorist acts," Ashcroft said at the time.

Silberman, a former federal appeals court judge and ambassador to Yugoslavia, has been known to speak his mind. He did so memorably in a 2002 speech to the conservative Federalist Society when he criticized the Supreme Court for "ducking" affirmative action cases and following "elite public opinion."

The Republican also had something to say in the perjury and obstruction probe of President Clinton's intimate relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Silberman said the presidents' aides had decided to "literally and figuratively declare war" on prosecutor Ken Starr, a former appeals court colleague of Silberman.

And in an odd intersection with Robb's career, Silberman helped write the decision that overturned the convictions of Iran-Contra figure Oliver North, a pivotal event that undercut the criminal investigation then under way.

Robb, 64, won a bruising 1994 Senate election against North, then lost his seat in the 2000 election after an uninspired campaign against a popular ex-governor.

A Marine wed in the White House to President Johnson's daughter, Lynda Bird Johnson, Robb was a bright hope for the Democrats as governor and U.S. senator in the 1980s. But an alleged dalliance with a former beauty queen and the acrimonious contest with North tarnished his prospects.

In the four years since he left the Senate, Robb has taught government and public policy at George Mason University near his home in suburban Virginia and spent a semester as a lecturer at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

North had something of effect on Silberman's career, too.

The first Bush administration considered Silberman for a Supreme Court post but his participation in the North ruling in the Iran-Contra affair would have made him a difficult nominee to get confirmed.

Silberman will be working on the commission with a former colleague with whom he frequently disagreed, Patricia Wald. President Carter nominated her to the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., in 1979.

"They've kind of picked at the two ends of the judicial spectrum," said Marc Rotenberg, who runs the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center.

When Wald stepped aside as chief judge of the appeals court in Washington, she publicly rejected speculation in legal circles that her timing was aimed at denying the post to Silberman.

Silberman and Wald get along well despite being frequently at odds in their judicial views, say people who have dealt with them for many years.

Wald was a judge on the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.