Years ago, I was having a conversation with a jazz pianist who told me, “When I hit a wrong note, I keep hitting it — so the audience will think it’s intentional.” To move away from the wrong note would be a subtle admission of a mistake.
I think House Intelligence Committee Chairman [tag]Peter Hoekstra[/tag] (R) lives by the same principle.
The chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee accused U.S. intelligence chief [tag]John Negroponte[/tag]’s office on Thursday of downplaying the significance of [tag]chemical weapons[/tag] finds in Iraq.
Rep. Peter [tag]Hoekstra[/tag], a Michigan Republican, said in a letter to Negroponte that intelligence officials at a June 21 press briefing organized by his office misled journalists about the significance of 500 munitions containing [tag]mustard[/tag] and [tag]sarin[/tag] nerve agents discovered since May 2004.
Intelligence officials at the briefing told journalists the weapons predated the 1991 Gulf War, were too degraded to be used as originally intended and posed no threat to U.S. forces deployed in the region during the run-up to the 2003 invasion.
“I am very disappointed by the inaccurate, incomplete, and occasionally misleading comments made by the briefers,” Hoekstra said in the letter, a copy of which was released by his office.
Look, Hoekstra hit the wrong note last week. He and Rick [tag]Santorum[/tag] announced, falsely, that we’d found [tag]WMD[/tag] in [tag]Iraq[/tag], by pointing to old munitions shells that Saddam Hussein used in his war against Iran long before the first Gulf [tag]War[/tag], which weren’t even new since everyone already knew about them. Every military and intelligence official in DC said Hoekstra and Santorum are wrong, including Bush administration officials and the president’s hand-picked WMD investigators.
And yet, Hoekstra, like the jazz pianist, keeps hitting the note anyway. The difference is, the musician may get some credit for creativity. Hoekstra is just embarrassing himself.
[tag]David Kay[/tag], the CIA’s former chief weapons hunter in Iraq, tried to explain yesterday to members of the House Armed Services Committee (thanks to D.D. for the tip) that these 500 [tag]shells[/tag] are not what Hoekstra and Santorum want them to be.
As far back as September 2004, the CIA had disclosed the discovery of the old chemical munitions from Iraq’s war with Iran. The CIA also explained that these weapons were not the ones the Bush administration had used to justify the invasion of Iraq. What’s more, Kay said, the decades-old sarin nerve gas was probably no more dangerous than household pesticides — and far more likely to degrade at room temperature.
“In terms of toxicity, sir,” Kay told Weldon at one point, “I suspect in your house, and I know in my house, I have things that are more toxic than sarin produced from 1984 to 1988.”
Kay colleagues said the same thing.
[T]wo briefers for the Defense Intelligence Agency explained that the recovered weapons were too degraded to serve their original purpose and too delicate to be used as roadside explosives. “These munitions that were found were badly corroded in most cases,” said DIA analyst Col. [tag]John Chiu[/tag]. “Some were deliberately dismantled, if you will, to prevent them from being used.” To make matters worse, [tag]Terence Taylor[/tag], a former member of the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq, testified that the warheads’ designs made the nerve gas almost impossible to use outside of its original purpose. “I think it would be very difficult to extract the nerve agent from these [tag]weapons[/tag],” he said.
It’s been nearly three years since Charles [tag]Duelfer[/tag] said Iraq did not possess, or have concrete plans to develop, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. The weapons just aren’t there to be found. Santorum and Hoekstra are demonstrably wrong, and Rep. [tag]Curt Weldon[/tag]’s (R-Pa.) plan to secretly go digging around in the desert to prove otherwise is sheer madness.
How long can these guys keep hitting the wrong note before they realize how wrong it sounds?