This is completely unnecessary:

Think Progress:

On Saturday, President Obama announced that he will be nominating Defense Department intelligence chief James Clapper to be the new Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

Liberal critics are pointing out that Clapper, while serving as the head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, helped assist the Bush administration lie that Iraq possessed illegal weapons of mass destruction. Speaking to reporters in October 2003, Clapper suggested that the illicit weapons had “unquestionably” been moved to Syria:

The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material “unquestionably” had been moved out of Iraq. [...]

He said he was providing a personal assessment. But he said “the obvious conclusion one draws” was that there “may have been people leaving the scene, fleeing Iraq, and unquestionably, I am sure, material.” A spokesman for General Clapper’s agency, David Burpee, said he could not provide further evidence to support the general’s statement.

For that failure alone, he should not be the DNI. (If you are going to assert something like that you need bulletproof evidence, not a surmise from mere traffic.) But the question remains, why is Obama picking this guy?


posted by Quiddity at 6/08/2010 12:55:00 AM