Hoekstra Disgusted With Hayden And The CIA
In an interview with the NY Sun, Hoekstra explains that his panel has more questions than answers on the destruction of the interrogation tapes. He is equally disgusted with the NIE report from last week. I get the distinct impression that Hoekstra is calling him a liar:
Following a 90-minute closed-door hearing yesterday in the Senate, Mr. Hayden told reporters that he laid out narrative for why the tapes were destroyed. But because both the recording and the destruction took place before he became director of the CIA, he could not provide all the answers to the questions from the Senators. The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Rockefeller, a Democrat of West Virginia, said yesterday questions remained unanswered. Mr. Hoekstra also told The New York Sun that he told Mr. Hayden personally that the briefing his committee received on this month’s Iran National Intelligence Estimate was “embarrassing.”
That assessment asserts that Iran’s enrichment of uranium in Natanz, Iran, is distinct from a nuclear weapons program that it halted in the fall of 2003. Mr. Hoekstra yesterday said he did not know what the distinction meant, and the basis for that conclusion was “non-existent.”“You would expect a very crisp presentation of sources and methods, that would lead you to reach these types of radically different conclusions from what they were saying as recently as three or four months ago,” Mr. Hoekstra said. “From my perspective the basis was non-existent.”
Hoekstra says that the last briefings on the tapes came two years prior. In between, the CIA changed leadership twice, and the CIA failed to engage with Congress before the decision was made to destroy the tapes in 2005. That doesn’t square with Hayden’s public statement that oversight committees got informed of the plan prior to their destruction.
Hoekstra wants American intelligence to have credibility, but at the moment, it’s difficult to see where it can muster any at all.
December 12, 2007 - 03:48 PM on December 12th, 2007
And what do you think of the very popular view by a leading Israeli analyst Obadiah Shoher? He argues (here, for example, www. samsonblinded.org/blog/america-arranges-a-peace-deal-with-iran.htm ) that the Bush Administration made a deal with Iran: nuclear program in exchange for curtailing the Iranian support for Iraqi terrorists. His story seems plausible, isn’t it?
December 12, 2007 - 04:11 PM on December 12th, 2007
Greetings
I personally am glad the tapes have been destroyed. I believe there are members of congree that cannot be trusted to keep classified material , well, classified. To many leaks have come from our intelligence overseerers. Since the tapes could be twisted to help the leftist agenda I am sure they would have been leaked, endangering our CIA agants and other assets. Leakey Leahy did not earn his nickname for his closed mouth you know. Rockefeller has no idea of how to keep a secret, unless it hurts his agenda.