The White House has got to be loving House intelligence committee chairman Hoekstra today.

House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra criticized the Bush administration on Sunday for its handling of a trove of once-secret documents from Saddam Hussein's covert nuclear program disclosed on a federal Web site.

Hoekstra, R-Mich., complained the U.S. intelligence community hadn't properly declassified the documents.

"Well, you know, we have a process in place. It looks like they screwed up," he said on CNN's "Late Edition."

President Bush's director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, ordered the documents posted on the site last March, at the request of Republicans in Congress who wanted to show Saddam was a real threat.

Put on the web at the request specifically of people like -- oh yeah: Hoekstra, Pat Roberts and Rick Santorum. From Saturday's follow up in the NYT:

The director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, had resisted setting up the Web site, which some intelligence officials felt implicitly raised questions about the competence and judgment of government analysts. But President Bush approved the site’s creation after Congressional Republicans proposed legislation to force the documents’ release. [...]

The campaign for the Web site was led by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. Last November, he and his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, wrote to Mr. Negroponte, asking him to post the Iraqi material. The sheer volume of the documents, they argued, had overwhelmed the intelligence community.

So Hoekstra is content to let Negroponte take it on the ear on this one, not for the first time. What's the word for going on national television to blame others for what he specifically is most responsible for in all of Washington? It seems to be becoming an epidemic.

Posted by Laura at November 5, 2006 03:31 PM