Hoekstra’s Hoax: Just When You Thought You’d Seen Everything [View All]

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by Ray McGovern

Talk about chutzpah! I was suffering a bit from outrage fatigue Thursday but was shaken out of it as soon as I downloaded an unusually slick paper, “Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States,” released this week by House intelligence committee chair, Pete Hoekstra.

No, not hoaxer. This is serious—very serious. The paper amounts to a pre-emptive strike on what’s left of the Intelligence Community, usurping its prerogative to provide policymakers with estimates on front-burner issues—in this case, Iran’s “weapons of mass destruction” and other threats. The Senate had already requested a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran.

But Hoekstra is first out of the starting gate. Professional intelligence officers were “as a courtesy” invited to provide input to Hoekstra’s report, but there is no evidence they contributed. Indeed, several rather basic factual errors suggest they refused even to review a paper clearly aimed at marginalizing them. It will be interesting to see how Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte chooses to respond. “Team player” that he is, Negroponte seems unlikely to make an issue of this latest indignity at the hands of his nominal overseer in the House. And that should squeeze out what’s left of morale in the ranks of honest intelligence analysts.

While you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can glean insight these days from the titles given to National Intelligence Estimates and papers meant to supplant them. Remember “Iraq’s Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” the infamous NIE of October 1, 2002 by which Congress was misled into approving an unnecessary war? “Continuing” leaped out of the title, foreshadowing the one-sided thrust of an estimate ostensibly commissioned to determine whether WMD programs were “continuing,” or whether they had been dead for ten years. (The latter turned out to be the case, but the title—and the cooked insides—provided the scare needed to get Congress aboard.)

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http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0826-20.htm