Think Progress

Maddow Rips Rep. Pete Hoekstra For Leaking Sensitive National Security Information

Last night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow accused Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee and current gubernatorial candidate, of leaking sensitive intelligence information to the press. Hoekstra told the Washington Post this week that Maj. Nidal M. Hasan had e-mail conversations with a radical Yemeni cleric, Anwar al-Aulaqi. Maddow excoriated Hoekstra for letting Aulaqi know that his e-mail is being monitored:

MADDOW: Why is it Pete Hoekstra who’s taking it upon himself to tell the press that this radical cleric is having his email read by U.S. intelligence agencies? The FBI had not said publicly that this cleric had been emailing Hasan. The CIA, the NSA, the White House — nobody else had reported this cleric was e-mailing Hasan. This is just Pete Hoekstra letting us know — and letting the radical cleric who is under surveillance know — that he’s under surveillance.

Maddow’s guest, The Nation’s Chris Hayes, said Hoekstra’s reputation is “of an epic grand-stander.” Watch it:

Asked if there was a concern that Hoekstra was leaking sensitive information, a Republican spokesman for the House intelligence committee told Maddow’s show, “I do not know, guessing, since [Aulaqi] was deported, he knew he was a target anyways.” Maddow noted that Aulaqi wasn’t “deported,” but rather left the country voluntarily, according to the 9-11 Commission. (Aulaqi had contacts with some of the 9-11 hijackers.)

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) said, “I am disappointed that some have rushed to the news media with unfounded information in order to gain headlines.”

Hoekstra has been trying to use the Ft. Hood shootings to engage in a political attack against Obama, claiming “administration officials delayed briefing members of Congress about the alleged gunman,” thus raising “red flags” about what the White House was hiding. “What do they know that they don’t want us to know?” Hoekstra said on Fox News.

Rep. Adam Smith Responds To Rove: Administration Leaks ‘Far, Far, Far More’ Than Congress

Last night on Fox News, former Bush policy czar Karl Rove argued that the administration is justified in withholding information from Congress. “It is so dangerous to give Congress information” because they leak it, Rove argued.

ThinkProgress interviewed Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) earlier today, and asked him to respond to that accusation by Rove:

First of all, leaks come far, far, far more often from the administration than they do from Congress. So if the issue is we can’t tell anyone because they might leak it, well then you better not do it at all, because you’re going to have to tell somebody and somebody’s going to leak it. Vastly more amounts of secret programs have come out of the administration than they have come out of Congress.

Smith added that the importance of informing Congress is because of the need for checks and balances. “We have oversight responsibility for the intelligence community,” he explained. Smith said that if the intelligence community pursues wrong or illegal activities, Congress is held responsible for it. “If we’re not briefed fully and in a timely manner,” he said, referencing the recent example of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “then we’re being held responsible for things we didn’t know about.” Watch it:

Smith is of course correct that the Executive Branch leaks a great deal. After all, while working in the White House, Karl Rove himself leaked classified national security information, helping to damage the career of a covert CIA agent. Moreover, the secret program that has been reported in the press in recent days (purportedly a targeted assassination program) was leaked to the Wall Street Journal by “two former intelligence officials familiar with the matter” in its report — not Congress.

Liz Cheney: Investigating My Dad Would Prove Americans ‘Can’t Trust’ Democrats With National Security

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that former Vice President Dick Cheney gave “direct orders” to the CIA, compelling the agency to withhold “information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years.” Despite news organizations’ efforts to contact him, Cheney has yet to comment on the revelation.

Following the revelation, congressional Democrats have called for an investigation into the hidden program, which the Wall Street Journal reports involved “an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives.” But on the Washington Times’ America’s Morning News radio show today, Cheney’s daughter, Liz, lashed back at his critics:

CHENEY: There’s this big piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning that says that it was a number of different concepts for ways that we could capture or kill al Qaeda leaders in the days after 9/11. I am really surprised that the Democrats decide that that’s what they want to fight over. I mean, if they want to go to the American people and say that they disagree with the notion that we ought to be capturing and killing al Qaeda leaders, I think it’s just going to prove to the American people one more time why they can’t trust the Democrats with our national security.

Cheney claimed that complaints by Democrats that the program was concealed from Congress are surfacing only because they are “very worried about Speaker Pelosi” and the attacks on her over her claim that the CIA misled her about the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding. Listen here:

Of course, Cheney is dodging the issue of whether Bush and Cheney fulfilled their obligations under the National Security Act of 1947, which says that congressional intelligence committees must be “kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.”

Cheney also responded to news that Attorney General Holder is considering appointing a special prosecutor to investigate “the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices,” calling it “shameful.” She added that her father is “very angry” about the development:

CHENEY: His reaction to the story that we may well be prosecuting folks, I’m happy to talk about that. … You know, he is very angry, as you’ve heard him say publicly. You know the notion that this administration is going to come into office and they’re going to prosecute the brave men and women who carried out this program that kept America safe. It is, it is un-American. It’s something that hasn’t happened before in this country, in terms of somebody taking office and then starting to prosecute people who carried out policies that they disagreed with, you know, in the previous administration. He’s been very public about that.

Cheney says that Holder would be investigating people “who carried this program out according to the Department of Justice opinions,” but Newsweek reports that Holder is more concerned about “startling indications that some interrogators had gone far beyond what had been authorized in the legal opinions.”

Saddam Hussein Considered ‘Security Agreement’ With U.S. To Counter Threat From ‘Fanatics’ In Iran

Yesterday, the National Security Archive released declassified FBI reports detailing both the bureau’s interrogations and “casual conversations” with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. According to the documents, Hussein told FBI agent George Piro (one of only a few agents who spoke Arabic) that he let the world believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he feared appearing weak to what he considered his country’s real threat, Iran:

Hussein’s fear of Iran, which he said he considered a greater threat than the United States, featured prominently in the discussion about weapons of mass destruction. … Hussein said he was convinced that Iran was trying to annex southern Iraq — which is largely Shiite. [...]

“The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors,” Piro wrote. “Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq.”

Saddam “felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from ‘fanatic’ leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a ‘security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region.’” If that could not happen, only then, he said, would Iraq reconstitute its WMD programs.

Piro revealed to CBS’s 60 Minutes last year that Saddam “didn’t want to associate” with Osama bin Laden and viewed him “as a threat to him and his regime.” The new documents expound on Saddam’s distrust of Al Qaeda and bin Laden, whom he called “a zealot”:

Hussein replied that throughout history there had been conflicts between believers of Islam and political leaders. He said that “he was a believer in God but was not a zealot…that religion and government should not mix.” Hussein said that he had never met bin Laden and that the two of them “did not have the same belief or vision.”

When Piro noted that there were reasons why Hussein and al-Qaeda should have cooperated — they had the same enemies in the United States and Saudi Arabia — Hussein replied that the United States was not Iraq’s enemy, and that he simply opposed its policies.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and numerous members of the Bush administration repeatedly cited the (now debunked) threat from Iraq’s supposed WMD program and Saddam Hussein’s alleged links to Al-Qaeda as the main justifications for launching the invasion of Iraq more than six years ago. The U.S. could end up spending trillions of dollars in Iraq and today, 130,000 U.S. troops remain there, 4,321 have died (4,639 total from coalition forces), and more than 30,000 have been wounded. Over 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion while millions have been displaced.

Durbin Calls On Gingrich To Apologize For Attacking The CIA In 2007 »

Last week, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich called on Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to resign her current position as Speaker. He said that she “disqualified herself” over her comments that the CIA was “misleading” Congress.

As ThinkProgress pointed out, Gingrich himself has accused the CIA, among other U.S. intelligence agencies, of misleading Congress and undermining the president. In response to the release of the 2007 Iran National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) — which concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program — Gingrich said that he believed the NIE and its authors were “damaging to our own national security.” He said that the document was “a deliberate attempt to undermine the policies of President Bush by members of his own government by suggesting that Iran no longer poses a serious threat to U.S. national security.”

Today on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) brought up this point. He said that if Gingrich is so offended by Pelosi’s comments, then he should also apologize for what he said in 2007:

DURBIN: I’d just say that I’m afraid Mr. Gingrich is suffering from a little political amnesia here. He’s forgotten that in year 2007, he criticized the National Intelligence estimate in regard to the capability of Iran to develop nuclear weapons and said that — if I remember the quote correctly, I’m looking down here — that what they did damaged our national security and misled the American people. Mr. Gingrich, would you like to make an apology to our intelligence agency for what you said in 2007?

GINGRICH: I said that particular report was intellectually dishonest. It was a public, non-classified report, and we were debating it. I said it was intellectually dishonest. I never said the CIA lied to the Congress, which would be illegal. It would be a felony.

Watch it:

During the exchange, Durbin also brought up Rep. Pete Hoekstra’s (R-MI) criticisms of the CIA, including his 2008 statement that the CIA “may have been lying or concealing part of the truth” in testimony to Congress regarding a 2001 incident in which the CIA mistakenly killed an American citizen in Peru. “We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress,” Hoekstra said of the incident. “Should he apologize?” asked Durbin. Gingrich, of course, responded that there was nothing wrong with what Hoekstra said.

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Rep. Hoekstra: Only I’m Allowed To Accuse The CIA Of Lying

In recent days, conservatives have been on a media blitz accusing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) of lying last week when she said that she believed she had been “misled” by the CIA during intelligence briefings regarding the use of torture. Last night on Fox News’s On The Record, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) continued this blitz, arguing that Pelosi did not want to “take accountability and responsibility for the actions that she took in 2002, 2003″ and is instead simply “blaming the CIA.”

When host Greta Van Sustern pointed out that “CIA has not been perfect” in recent years, Hoekstra explained that in his view it is okay to criticize the agency’s performance, but it is another thing to accuse the CIA of having misled Congress:

HOEKSTRA: I think you do go back and you break it into two different issues. One is the performance, how well, they’re doing their job. The second is whether they have misled or lied to Congress, two very, very different issues.

Watch it:

Yesterday on CNN’s American Morning, Hoekstra made similar remarks, referring to Pelosi’s claims as “outrageous accusations.” He also appeared last night on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight and this morning on talk radio with Bill Bennett and Laura Ingraham.

Hoekstra’s repeated objections to Pelosi accusing the CIA of having lied to Congress is quite odd given the fact that he’s made nearly identical claims on multiple occasions. As Marcy Wheeler first noted, Hoekstra wrote a letter to President Bush in 2006 accusing the intelligence community of withholding information on their activities from Congress. “I have learned of some alleged Intelligence Community activities about which our committee has not been briefed,” Hoekstra wrote. He said that he believed the Bush administration’s failure to fully brief his committee could constitute “a violation of law“:

Similarly, in 2007, Hoekstra described a closed-door briefing by representatives from the intelligence community (including CIA) on the National Intelligence Estimate of Iran’s nuclear capability, saying that the members “didn’t find [the briefers] forthcoming.” More recently, in November 2008, Hoekstra concluded that the CIA “may have been lying or concealing part of the truth” in testimony to Congress regarding a 2001 incident in which the CIA mistakenly killed an American citizen in Peru. “We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress,” Hoekstra said of the incident.