Alas, the story late last week about the Bush administration accidentally publishing nuclear secrets in Arabic on the Internet did not cause quite the stir that I had hoped for. Perhaps if John Kerry had told a joke about it, and left out a word, the story could have received wall-to-wall coverage on TV.
That said, there has been some interesting follow-up. For example, one of the people who convinced the Bush gang to publish the materials is now publicly criticizing the administration for its poor judgment.
House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra criticized the Bush administration on Sunday for its handling of a trove of once-secret documents from Saddam Hussein’s covert nuclear program disclosed on a federal Web site.
Hoekstra, R-Mich., complained the U.S. intelligence community hadn’t properly declassified the documents.
“Well, you know, we have a process in place. It looks like they screwed up,” he said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”
President Bush’s director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, ordered the documents posted on the site last March, at the request of Republicans in Congress who wanted to show Saddam was a real threat.
And who, exactly, led these requests and pushed the administration into making this dangerous error? That would be Peter Hoekstra.
The campaign for the Web site was led by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. Last November, he and his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, wrote to Mr. Negroponte, asking him to post the Iraqi material. The sheer volume of the documents, they argued, had overwhelmed the intelligence community. […]
On April 18, about a month after the first documents were made public, Mr. Hoekstra issued a news release acknowledging “minimal risks,” but saying the site “will enable us to better understand information such as Saddam’s links to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and violence against the Iraqi people.” He added: “It will allow us to leverage the Internet to enable a mass examination as opposed to limiting it to a few exclusive elites.”
Wait, it gets better. After the IAEA, intelligence officials, nuclear scientists, and European diplomats expressed alarm that the United States government had posted nuclear secrets online, Hoekstra’s office said the revelations “didn’t sound like a big deal,” and complained that the website with the dangerous information had been pulled down.
And now Hoeksta wants the nation to know that the administration “screwed up.” Far be it for me to defend the Bush gang against the Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman, but the leak was Hoeksta’s idea.
If you don’t want Hoeksta to be chairman of this critically important committee tomorrow, you can give him a demotion tomorrow.
Post Script: By the way, it’s worth adding that Democratic Sens. Harry Reid of Nevada, Carl Levin of Michigan, Joe Biden of Delaware and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia all demanded over the weekend that the administration explain how and why this fiasco happened. The media largely ignored this, as will the Bush gang, but if there’s a Democratic majority in the Senate, expect these questions to be asked in a far more formal, hard-to-ignore way.