Intel chief can't answer 'fundamental questions' about the Middle East

Southpaw · December 11th, 2006, 04:12 AM

How deep is the Doo doo?

Quote:

New Dem House Intel chief can't answer 'fundamental questions' about the Middle East

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In an interview with the editor on national security for Congressional Quarterly, the incoming Democratic chairman for the House Intelligence Committee was unable to answer "fundamental questions" related to the Middle East, including which sects terror groups adhere to.

Last October, CQ's Jeff Stein interviewed Washington counterterrorism officials and two Republican Congress members who oversaw spy agencies at the time for an Op-Ed in the New York Times, and found that they could also use "crash courses" in al Qaeda and Hezbollah. In an effort to be fair, Stein asked similiar questions of Texas Congressman Silvestre Reyes, recently selected by incoming House Leader Nancy Pelosi to chair the House Intelligence Committee.

"Reyes stumbled when I asked him a simple question about al Qaeda at the end of a 40-minute interview in his office last week," Stein writes for CQ. "Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East."

"The dialogue went like this:

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

"Al Qaeda, they have both," Reyes said. "You’re talking about predominately?"

"Sure," I said, not knowing what else to say.

"Predominantly — probably Shiite," he ventured.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball."

But Stein reports that Reyes knew more than his last round of "Gotcha" victims.

"Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va., and Terry Everett, R-Ala., both back for another term, were flummoxed by such basic questions, as were several top counterterrorism officials at the FBI," when Stein wrote about them in October.

Willie Hulon, Executive Assistant Director for the FBI's new National Security Branch, falsely answered that Iran and Hezbollah were Sunnis, while the Republican House intelligence subcommittee chairs couldn't tell the difference between Shiites and Sunnis, although they both admitted that such knowledge was "very important."

At the time, Media Matters questioned why The New York Times let the news that top terror officials couldn't tell Shiites from Sunnis left to be reported by an Op-Ed contributor on the back page, instead of by its own reporting staff.

"While Stein raises an important question, the fact that this information first appeared in the Times on its op-ed page raises another question: How is it that the Times has let this simple, yet critical, piece of information regarding the basic competencies of the Bush administration officials and Republican legislators managing U.S. national security go unreported in its news pages?" Media Matters' S.S.M asked.

In his latest column, Stein writes, "It begs the question, of course: How can the Intelligence Committee do effective oversight of U.S. spy agencies when its leaders don’t know basics about the battlefield?"

But then adds "why should we expect" them to "get it right," when "President Bush and some of his closest associates, not to mention top counterterrorism officials, have demonstrated their own ignorance about who the players are in the Middle East."

Stein recalls words spoken by Mississippi's Republican senator Trent Lott last September after a meeting between the Senate Intelligence Committee and Bush.

"Why do Sunnis kill Shiites?" Lott asked. "How do they tell the difference?"

"They all look the same to me," Lott said.

Stein's full CQ column can be read at this link

At The Next Hurrah, Marcy Wheeler, the author of an upcoming book on the CIA Plame leak affair who blogs under the name "emptywheel," proposes that the liberal blogosphere come up with a test of "fifty questions a legislator should be able to answer correctly before he or she can vote on laws relating to those subjects" to send to Democratic Congressional leaders.

"Hell--at the very least, maybe they can get their legislators to cram for the quiz so they don't sound quite so embarrassing in interviews," emptywheel writes.

arthurracoon · December 11th, 2006, 04:48 AM

AZZenny · December 11th, 2006, 05:23 AM

Oh man. Do you realize probably most of the posters here are better-informed than the guys who run our Intelligence system? And we wonder why they got bad intel about Iraq? Of course they wouldn't have warned about Shia-Sunni conflict -- they can't tell them apart.

40yearfan · December 11th, 2006, 06:56 AM

Quote:

"Why do Sunnis kill Shiites?" Lott asked. "How do they tell the difference?"

"They all look the same to me," Lott said.

LoyaltyisaCurse · December 11th, 2006, 06:55 PM

idiots...

Lotts comments probably resembles his views on other races of people...

40yearfan · December 11th, 2006, 06:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LoyaltyisaCurse

idiots...

Lotts comments probably resembles his views on other races of people...

LIAC, you have absolutely no sense of humor.

LoyaltyisaCurse · December 11th, 2006, 08:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 40yearfan

LIAC, you have absolutely no sense of humor.

I see what you were laughing at, but the sad thing is, I believe Lott is being serious.

Unfortunately, that same attitude is what got the Bush administration in deep doo in thier planning.

Southpaw · December 12th, 2006, 03:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LoyaltyisaCurse

I see what you were laughing at, but the sad thing is, I believe Lott is being serious.

Unfortunately, that same attitude is what got the Bush administration in deep doo in thier planning.

Lott doesn't seem to have a sense of humor on certain issues.

Quote:

Trent Lott Back in GOP Senate Leadership, Despite Racist Past
by Peter Lauterborn‚ Nov. 17‚ 2006

I can’t imagine the feeling. You are one of the most powerful men in the country, and a leader of your party. Plus, you’re having a great time at a colleague’s 100th birthday party. Trying to be the man of the hour, you utter what eventually becomes the slipup of the year. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi lost his seat as Senate Majority Leaders after stating that the nation would have been better off if the late Senator Strom Thurmond had won the 1948 Presidential election, when the man ran as a segregationist. Talk about a rain on the party. Four years later—after the horrors of Katrina—Lott is back in the Republican Senate leadership as Minority Whip, their second highest post.

The real crime at the time of his statement was that the rest of the Republican Party tried to pretend to not have know they had a closet racist in their midsts. They pretended that had the Republicans known Lott’s true bigotry that they would have never elected him as their Senate Majority Leader.

But they did. Civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, have long resented Lott’s actions on the Senate floor. Here’s a taste of Lott’s voting record:

-In 1983 Lott opposed a new federal holiday commemorating the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.

- In 1993, Lott voted to extend the Confederate flag design patent for the Daughters of the Confederacy. The measure was defeated 75-25

- In 1994, Lott sided with a Helms amendment to strip federal funding from the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission. The amendment was defeated.

- In 1998, both voted to eliminate a disadvantaged business enterprise program established in the Reagan administration to ensure that a certain percentage of federal contracts went to businesses headed by minorities and women. The program was preserved on a 58-37 vote.

- In 2002, Lott was the only dissenting vote in a 93-1 vote to approve Roger Gregory as the first black judge on the U.S. Appeals Court for the 4th Circuit.

Folks, these were not secret votes made in same phantom parliament. These are all documented, recorded and counted votes. Lott’s reputation as a racist began long ago.

Republicans knew exactly who they were electing as their leader back then, and they most certainly remember his past today. They wanted a passionate speaker, an experienced congressman, and a strong voice for the conservative cause. They found their man in Trent Lott.

What’s more, the Republican Party has again and again showed a lack of any concern for minorities since Lott’s departure from the leadership position. Katrina, Iraq death tolls, education funding, health care—the list goes on. Kanye West was right.

The reinstatement of Trent Lott shows that all of the anger and disgust over his comments was fake—they GOP wanted to wait out the storm, and get their man back in power as soon as possible.

But after all of the failures of the Republican Party coming to light, one would think that they would search elsewhere for leadership and for a new direction: take the hint from the voters and change their ways. But they chose to do the opposite: they chose and old southern standard bearer with a history of racism and a legacy neck deep in the party of failure. It is, in a word, disgraceful.

Right now, the nation knows what Trent Lott—and the Republicans who willingly elected him—want for this country. But hopefully the American public has not forgotten who this man is, what his party has done, and remain over the cloud of lies that the Republicans create.