Bureaucratic Wars and Useful Idiots -- Hoekstra's Complaint

Pity the people who get all their news from the MSM. There's so much going on that just doesn't get reported because the mandarins at the NYT deem it not "fit to print."

Case in point: the "leaked" letter from Peter Hoekstra to the administration, complaining that the House Intelligence Committee had not been fully briefed on some programs. Big news, at least from the NYT perspective. The article, by Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane, waxes eloquent on the growing rift between Congressional Republicans and the administration and friction on matters of oversight. There are hints of covert programs with rogue agents running amok, presumably at Dick Cheney's direction, without any controlling legal authority.

From the text of the letter, though, the real problem seems to be something else -- a staffing decision to appoint Gen. Michael Hayden to head the CIA with Stephen Kappes as his deputy. Some members of the committee were opposed to Kappes' appointment.

Completely ignored in the NYT account is the most important piece of information -- Hoekstra's assertion that:

I have been long concerned that a strong and well-positioned group within the Agency intentionally undermined the Administration and its policies. This argument is supported by the Ambassador Wilson/Valerie Plame events, as well as by the string of unauthorized disclosures from an organization that prides itself with being able to keep secrets.

This is explosive stuff -- the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee revealing the existence of a rogue element within the CIA that is actively trying to bring down the current administration. Why didn't Lichtblau and Shane think it worthy of mention? Could it be that they, too, want to bring down the administration?

Fortunately, we have dedicated bloggers like the folks at Sweetness & Light, who bother to check out the original text of the letter and reveal the parts the NYT didn't see "fit to print."

I don't agree with S&W that the NYT is a "paper of treason" -- Pinch's minions are more like the old "useful idiots" of the Cold War years who systematically misinformed the American public regarding international situations in order to pursue their own particular partisan or ideological agendas and therefore proved to be susceptible to Soviet manipulation. In this case those who are manipulating the idiots are not foreign agents but bureaucratic warriors who are using traditional Cold War tactics to forestall meaningful reform of their agency.

There is a largely unreported war going on within the beltway between the "professionals" -- unelected bureaucrats who resist oversight -- and the "politicians" -- elected representatives of the people and their minions who are trying to bring the bureaucrats to heel. In recent years this conflict has escalated to the point where it threatens the nation and its democratic institutions. It is a war that the politicians have to win if the republic is to survive. Government is far too important to be left to the professionals.

Read S&W's piece here.

On the corruption of the intelligence community see my earlier post here.