Hoekstra, as you know, along with Rick Santorum was one of the few members of Congress to push President Bush to release the Iraqi documents on to the Internet which allowed nuclear secrets to be read by anyone who speaks Arabic. He also seems to have a short memory about doing that pushing. From the Boston Globe:
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."
Hoekstra seems to forget that this is the exact program he pushed in the format he pushed, and which the Bush administration enacted. It was to go ahead and put the raw, untranslated documents on the web for all to see so that the "Army of Davids" (Right-Wing Bloggers) could speed the translation process. If these documents were to be properly vetted and declassified before appearing on the web, there was never a reason to put them on the web, because to do said vetting would require translation. At the Time Hoekstra had this to say:
They ought to be put on the Internet...unleash the power of the 'net on these 55,000 boxes of documents to see exactly what went on...Let the blogosphere go!"
Look, ultimately the responsibility for this intelligence failure falls at the feet of George Bush who went ahead with this dumb idea over the intelligence community's wishes including his own director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, but the fact is that Hoekstra and Santorum pushed Bush up to the cliff and now Hoekstra is blaming him for jumping.
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