Ed Morrissey
HotAir.com
6/5/2010
Well, maybe he did at one point, so expect this to become a big deal in James Clapper’s confirmation hearings to replace Dennis Blair as the Director of National Intelligence. Washington Times reporter Eli Lake did a little research on Barack Obama’s choice for the thankless position (Clapper would be the fourth DNI in five years) and discovered a nugget that comes straight out of the so-called neocon argument for war against Saddam Hussein:
President Obama’s choice to be the next director of national intelligence supported the view that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq sent weapons and documents to Syria in the weeks before the 2003 U.S. invasion.
A senior U.S. intelligence official said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and current undersecretary of defense for intelligence, will be the next DNI. A formal announcement is expected as early as Saturday. …
Gen. Clapper headed the National Geo-spatial Intelligence Agency between September 2001 to June 2006. The NGA is responsible for creating maps and terrestrial imagery and also assesses what is called “measurement and signature intelligence,” or MASINT, the intelligence function of analyzing such things as radar signals and the composition of air particles, soil samples and other physical characteristics of the earth.
On Iraq, Gen. Clapper said in an interview with The Washington Times in 2004 that “I think probably in the few months running up prior to the onset of combat that … there was probably an intensive effort to disperse into private homes, move documentation and materials out of the country. I think there are any number of things that they would have done.”
The comments came amid the debate over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, which some U.S. officials had said were moved out of Iraq prior to the invasion of Iraq with the assistance of Russian military intelligence forces.
From this description, it seems as though Clapper parsed his words carefully…
The rest of the article is at HotAir.com
