Here’s what was in the letter to President Bush from Peter Hoekstra, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, concerning the “troubling” choice of Stephen Kappes as Deputy Director of the CIA:

Here’s how the NYT headlined and positioned its article about the subject: “Ally Warned Bush on Keeping Spying From Congress.”

In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters.

That’s all fine and dandy, but why exactly did the NYT fail to mention one of the juiciest bits in the letter — that Steve Kappes may be a prime CIA leaker to the press, when CIA leaking has been a rather hot topic of conversation? As Tom McGuire noted, why did the Times not ask Kappes for a comment on Hoekstra’s allegation that he was a source for CIA leaks to the MSM? As McGuire said: “Then again, the Times may already know the answers.”

Why is reading the NYT often so much like reading Pravda was in the old days?

UPDATE

NRO speculates abour a possible connection to wannabe whistle-blower Russ Tice:

A former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency said Thursday he plans to tell Senate staffers next week that unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens. Russell Tice, who worked on what are known as “special access programs,” has wanted to meet in a closed session with members of Congress and their staff since President Bush announced in December that he had secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without a court order. In an interview late Thursday, Tice said the Senate Armed Services Committee finally asked him to meet next week in a secure facility on Capitol Hill.

There seem to be an awful lot of bigmouths in jobs for the silent.

UPDATE II

Both Tom McGuire and Christopher Hitchens lead us into the juicy realm of speculation on what law Hoekstra thinks may have been broken by the administration by not briefing the House (maybe FOIA?). Hitchens:

Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has in my opinion emerged as the most serious person in this argument. For years now, he has been pressing the CIA and the White House, without much success, to allow more declassification of documents about the Iraq war, in particular the vast warehouse of Baathist documentation now being held in Qatar. None of this closely held material could possibly compromise our security, and some of it has already undermined the lazy consensus that Saddam, WMD, and al-Qaida are never to be mentioned in the same breath. It is also likely to show that our supposed intelligence services were appallingly ignorant about what was happening in Baghdad. This is a bad reason for secrecy. Would it not be nice if the New York Times joined the campaign to have this material declassified and even sent some of its sleuths to Qatar to work on the subject?

But Rep. Hoekstra has also written to the president, announcing his alarm, about the way in which the administration seems to think it is a law unto itself when it comes to notifying Congress of some rather alarming and improvised rule changes—or “a violation of the law,” as he phrases it in his letter…

It seems only natural to consider the possibility that Hoekstra is upset because the Bush administration is sitting on something that would actually be helpful to the GWOT if disclosed — maybe WMD information, maybe Iraq-terrorist ties, maybe Iran and Syria involvement ,etc. Hopefully, we’ll know soon.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 9th, 2006 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, War, art, culture, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.