The Hoekstra letter

This morning's public airing of a recent letter sent by the Congressman to President Bush deriding intelligence secrecy could open yet another can of worms--just when everyone thought the banking story was the last of it. This time the leak came directly from the horse's mouth as opposed to the other end, which we're all so familiar with.

His letter was more than just a rebuke about the lack of coordination between the Executive and Legislative branches regarding secret counterterrorism programs, yet that aspect was the only headline according to the Times, AP, and Reuters. Guess they weren't too overly concerned with the allegation by a sitting Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee that the CIA was perhaps engaged in a political coup.

Maybe that's why neither CNN nor the WaPo had picked up the story as of this writing--perhaps they felt his mention of Valerie Plame and CIA gamesmanship would ruin Hoekstra's street cred with the left, thereby diminishing his Bush-bashing potential. The AP devoted the last paragraph of their online story to it--one sentence--without bothering to quote or elaborate.

But we know the secrecy issue will remain front and center. Most lefties would say such secrecy is nefarious on it's face and proves their contentions about oil, Halliburton, PNAC, Abramoff, DeLay, Rove, et al. But let's try an exercise in presumed innocence here. Forget the alleged illegality for a moment and just assume Bush is a decent man simply trying to protect America from known threats by keeping certain programs secret and out of earshot from enemies or blabbermouth partisan political opportunists.

If so, then whatever he's trying to protect us from must be pretty serious. Impeachment, frog marching or any other punitive removal methods wouldn't change that dynamic one little bit. I think I'd prefer the common crook explnation if given a choice.

But newspaper reality is all we've got. If we take Hoekstra's revelation (another unknown secret program) in context with other weird events in the past year, such as the puzzling release of Dr. Germ and Mrs. Anthrax in the face of documents now suggesting Iraq still had a BW program in 2002, or perhaps the populatation of Iraq's new most-wanted list with mainly ex-regime figures, or the fact Langley just closed the bin Laden unit...well, you figure it out.

As for me, time to watch some mindless sports and finish some yard work.

THE WaPo ARRIVES ON THE SCENE 7/10/06

The story made the Monday edition, but not the front page. Of interest, the story suggests that Hoekstra may not have received the report about the 500 chemical shells until after his complaint letter to Bush, which is similar to the squeaky wheel approach he took in getting the Saddam documents released. It's no wonder he's been critical of Negroponte.

As to those aforementioned shells,

Hoekstra also had shown deep interest in an April report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that Iranian troops had buried in the 1980s, which were uncovered in 2004.

Funny, I thought it was Iraqi troops who buried those shells, not Iranians. After all, that's exactly what the WaPo itself told us in their report of June 22nd:

The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.

Notice how utterly insignificant they made the discovery sound. But are we really to believe the Iranians buried them? Sounds like something Baghdad Bob would say.

CAN 'O CORN 7/10/06

David Corn's reply (via Pajamas Media) to the Hoekstra letter is a pretty good rendition of stock left boilerplate. He quotes published reports about the Plame affair, CIA leaks, and the 500 shells to paint Hoekstra as somewhat the conspiracist wingnut.

But that's because such reasoning, call it Iraq War conventional wisdom, has become irrefutable fact in the hearts of most port siders. No mystery in that--any cracks in that wisdom, such as evidence of a WMD program or coordination with AQ means the democrat ship goes to the bottom. Therefore most of those folks consider it settled already and scoff at any revisits.

Hoesktra wants a few revisits, but only because the picture is far from clear. The 500 shells were not what we necessarily went to war over, but in a way they were. Saddam gave a dossier to Blix in 2003 saying he had no such proscribed weapons. That kind of arrogant intransigence was the hallmark of his regime and went towards the casus belli argument that sanctions and UN inspections would never be sufficient.