This afternoon, the Heritage Foundation put on a program on the captured Iraqi documents that are being made available via Project Harmony. I was happy to see that Tom Joscelyn was one of the panelists. Hopefully he’ll post his impressions soon. You can get a podcast of the event here. I haven’t had time to listen to it yet, but this Reuters story gives a rather garbled account of the address given by Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee:
The Bush administration is preparing a crackdown on intelligence leaks to the media and will try to pursue prosecutions in some recent cases, the chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee on Tuesday.
“There will be a renewed effort by the Justice Department in a couple of these cases to go through the entire process … so they can prosecute,” Hoekstra said in a speech to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Hoekstra also said the newly-installed CIA director Michael Hayden was conducting aggressive internal investigations against leakers.
I’ll believe it when I see it. The response from Gen. Hayden’s office sounded more like the typical bureaucratic perspective on matters of vital national security:
CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck declined to comment on investigations but said Hayden believes greater communication within the agency could eliminate staff frustrations that lead to leaks.
Yeah, right. Reuters also attributes to Hoekstra a rather weird suggestion that the recent leaks may be due to penetration of our intelligence agencies by “other nations or organizations.” Hoekstra reportedly admitted that he had no evidence of any such penetration by foreign governments. I think that penetration of the CIA and other intelligence agencies by Democrats is more than enough to explain the leaks.
Via Power Line News.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.