Part Of Congressional Investigation Made Public
According to a Congressional investigation that has been made public today “Randy Cunningham pressured and intimidated staff members of the House Intelligence Committee to help steer more than $70 million in classified federal business to favored military contractors.”
The inquiry also found that despite numerous “red flags� about the propriety of a particular contract for work on a controversial Pentagon counterintelligence program, committee staff members for three years “continued to accept and support Mr. Cunningham’s growing requests for this project.�
Now this is information that is actually relevant in politics. Despite what Mr. Hoekstra thinks of it:
The report is another embarrassment for Congressional Republicans, who, three weeks before Election Day, are trying to contain the damage from accusations that former Representative Mark Foley, Republican of Florida, made sexually explicit remarks in e-mail messages to Congressional pages. The report on Mr. Cunningham was made public by Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.
Ms. Harman’s action drew a rebuke from Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the committee, who called the release “disturbing and beyond the pale.�
That is of course nonsense. When something is not in the interest of the Republican party, Mr. Hoekstra, it is not automatically “disturbing and beyond the pale”.
More:
The inquiry found no evidence that staff members of the Intelligence Committee had profited or expected to profit from Mr. Cunningham’s dealings. It also concluded that committee staff members had been suspicious of Mr. Wade and “disinclined to provide him any favorable treatment.�At the same time, committee staff members repeatedly acceded to Mr. Cunningham’s demands to steer money to Mr. Wade’s company, MZM Inc. The report describes how Mr. Cunningham worked to gain support within the Intelligence Committee for a program run by MZM at the Counterintelligence Field Activity agency of the Pentagon.
So, let me summarize: they thought that there was something fishy going on, yet they did what he wanted them to do.
Does this remind anyone else of something we heard about a little while ago?
15 Responses to “Part Of Congressional Investigation Made Public”
Careful, Michael. Hoekstra is a real Dutchman! He’s actually from Holland…Michigan.
Well, even Dutchmen can be wrong every now and then.
Not often, but it happens.
Hilzoy at ObsidianWings has some posts about the Republican leadership. The link to the NYT bout Republicans ignorance about Shiite/Sunni differences and Sanctorum’s Iraq/Hobbit talk are hilarious. And the Democrats have no policies…..
GollumGeorge W has the Ring…..
Elrod – Candice Miller’s campign flyer has no refence to the Republican party, the meltdown is reaching critical mass in light water…….
Yeah, I read that too. Completely absurd that they would not know such basic pieces of information.
My roomie asked me recently, “What do we do if they win?” What do you do if the politics of partisanship prove successful? If Rove’s playbook proves insurmountable even in the face of scandal and failure? If incumbancy is so strong that the party in power can stay there even if a majority of the country doesn’t want them to?
Do you put on the foil and start blaming Diebold? Gerrymandering? A declining faith in the government?
Or, just sit back, turn on the game, and enjoy the country’s newfound interest in benevolent despotism?
On an unrelated note.. “puttin’ on the foil”. Now I can’t stop thinking about Slap Shot.
To be fair I doubt it was just the Republicans who didn’t know the Sunni/Shia distinction. I’ve never heard a Democrat talk sense about that stuff either.
Santorum ducking the issues:
http://www.nwa.org or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=145LeBWUw3o
Mikkel – The problem is that the Republicans are in charge. These people didn’t even know that Iran is Shia. If their version of leadership is Weldon and Hoekstra, then Pelosi cannot be any worse. Sanctorum compares Iraq and Frodo and we worry about Pelosi?
Mikey:
You can’t read anything you trust in the MSM.
It’s all a conspiracy. Look at what the Seattle Post Intelligencer published on October 4.
dals in America tend to be bipartisan.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/287476_joel04.html
“In the early 1980s, the House censured Rep. Dan Crane, R-Ill., and Rep. Gerry Studds, D-Mass., for having sexual relations with teenage pages.
A third lawmaker, then-Rep. (now Sen.) Larry Craig, R-Idaho, called a press conference to deny any connection to the page scandal. Nobody had ever accused him of involvement.”
They knew!
The thing you always have to ask is how about Bill Clinton?
Look at the kind of drivel that get’s published in the New York Times.
—
[...] At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the bureau’s new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. “Yes, sure, it’s right to know the difference,� he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.�
That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. “The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following,� he said. “And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following.�
O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran — Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. “Iran and Hezbollah,� I prompted. “Which are they?�
He took a stab: “Sunni.�
[...]
Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.
“Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?� I asked him a few weeks ago.
Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: “One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.�
To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,� he replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.�
—
This undermines confidence in Homeland Security and besides that lot’s of Democrats don’t know the difference between Sunni and Shiite. Maybe Bill Clinton does, but that proves my point.
Holly I got another anti semite in Israel for you. For the last few years the Israeli universities haven’t been letting in any Arab students. Ha Ha Ha!
And one anti semite Jew said this:
–
Dr. Raphael Levine, the Hebrew University chemistry professor who accepted Ms. Salameh as his student, said he understood Israel’s security concerns but was baffled by the ban. “I think it is in Israel’s interest to strengthen the Palestinian middle class, and strengthening academic institutions in Palestinian areas is one sure way of achieving that,� he said.
“There is a Jewish tradition in which value is put on learning; Mr. Ben-Gurion said he wanted Israel to be a shining light to all nations,� he said, referring to Israel’s first prime minister. “You have to deliver on these things.�
“Both by sentiment and cold practicality, it is not in our interest to act like this,� Dr. Levine said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he is teaching at the University of California.
—-
We’ve got to work to get this guy deported to Iran or Cuba. The Jewish tradition is now to build a greater Israel so that biblical prophecies can be fullfilled and good people can rapture up to heaven without paing their credit card bills and watch the Jews, Catholics and other Satanists suffer which is why it’s called heaven.
And Israel needs to keep on providing a foretaste for Palestinians. Keepp them in their ghettoes! Anyone who says different is anti semite!
Ditto – The likes of Sanctorum, Weldon and Hoekstra are the face of Republican leadership in the GWOT. Please explain to me what expertise these idiots bring to the debate. The NYT article isn’t drivel, it shows the absurdity to the argument that the Republicans are strong on security.
Rudi,
I think that dittohead is taking a stab at satire.
CS – What is your take on the Defence experts – Sanctorum, Weldon and Hoekstra? How are these idiots worse than Pelosi?
I assume you meant, “How is Pelosi worse than these idiots?”
I don’t know if she is worse or not. Personally I wish we could send them all home and start over. When I think about how to determine the worse of what I consider to be two evils, I’m trying to think of what the overall effect of continued Republican leadership would be as compared to Dem leadership. Since I disagree with a lot of the domestic policy plans of the Dems, I’m not inclined to give them a shot at that (though I’m still weighing whether or not to be concerned that they’d actually get any of it through). On Iraq, I think that the pressure is on to either give it an all out effort or abandon it, and my hope is that someone has the cahoneys to push for the all out effort in some sensible way (to find any possible solution to get out without a complete loss). I have no clue what the Dems want to do (because I think they’re divided) but if anything, they would have more ability to push for a quick withdrawal by using the power of the purse, so I’m not comfortable with taking a chance on that. If the Republicans stay in control, I do think that the Baker plan will probably be adopted, whatever it is, and that it will have some face saving way for Bush to move off of his “stay the course” position. He’s already starting to say that “stay the course” really means that he doesn’t think we should leave before the job is done, not that it means that we shouldn’t change strategy.
On general security issues, I think the current administration goes too far with the NSA secrecy but I think the Dems would tend to limit his authority too much. On interrogation, I’m disgusted with the Repubs for the recent bill but the Dems didn’t even try to stop it, so no clear winner on that either. Basically, when I try to analyze, there is no good choice; it’s a crapshoot.
Dittohead, I saw that article without your assistance. Bureaucracy in Israel is truly byzantine. Now, please go educate yourself.