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Hoekstra Ridicules Dems' Environmental Intelligence
The 2008 intelligence authorization bill put before Congress this week diverts CIA and other intelligence resources away from terrorism-related issues to study global climate change – and Rep. Peter Hoekstra believes that’s flat-out wrong. In a op-ed article in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, the Michigan congressman – the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee – said: "We’ve been down this road before. "In the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, declared that environmental concerns and national security would share equal status in U.S. foreign policy. Immediately following that announcement, CIA Director John Deutch said in July 1996 that the U.S. was diverting spy satellites to photograph ‘ecologically sensitive’ sites.” Rep. Hoekstra charged that Deutch adopted that policy to "curry favor” with then-Vice President Al Gore.
Story Continues Below Deutch’s successor at the CIA, George Tenet, continued the policy by keeping open the Director of Central Intelligence Environmental Center, which had ordered intelligence analysts and collectors to write about "volcano eruptions, fish schools and air pollution,” Hoekstra writes. "At the direction of the Center, spy satellites were tasked to conduct what some in the press dubbed ‘environmental peeking. "The diversion meant fewer overhead images of vital national security concerns, such as Iran, North Korea and al-Qaida. "I wonder what intelligence clues in the run-up to 9/11 were missed because our spy satellites were focused on the polar ice caps and schools of fish instead of Afghanistan and bin Laden. "Now House Democrats want to return to the days when the CIA wasted valuable resources.”
Hoekstra said he is not questioning the validity of global climate change. He simply feels that this should not be the concern of the intelligence community. "The Democrats’ 2008 intelligence authorization bill is a throwback to the mistakes of the 1990s when scarce resources were diverted to issues that clearly were not related to the business of intelligence,” Hoekstra asserts. He concludes: "The world remains a dangerous place … Let our spies be spies.”
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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