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

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RAW STORY
Published: Sunday December 10, 2006

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 $265,200 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.