By Pete Hoekstra’s 2006 logic, he might be trying to help al-Qaeda

Check out Rachel Maddow going hard on Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) for publicly revealing that the U.S. intelligence community is intercepting the communications of al-Qaeda-sympathetic cleric Anwar Aulaqi, a former U.S. preacher now in Yemen whom Fort Hood murder suspect Nidal Malik Hasan apparently contacted before the shooting.

Students of Hoekstra know that this kind of recklessness is nothing new. In 2006, when he chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the man actually wrote in The Wall Street Journal that unnamed members of the U.S. intelligence community were “perhaps” leaking classified information to the press to “help al Qaeda.” I confronted him about it back then, and here’s how that went:

I asked Hoekstra about his charge that certain members of the intelligence community seek to “help Al Qaeda,” he stood by it. But, curiously, he couldn’t finger any specific Al Qaeda sympathizers in the CIA. “If I were aware of anyone by name or by position that I believe at this point in time was there because their intent was to help those who might attack us, they wouldn’t be there,” he assured.

Then why make the claim?

“You have to hold that out as a possibility,” Hoekstra explained. “I mean, every day–not every day, but on occasion, and more frequently than what we would like–we find out that the intelligence community has been penetrated, not necessarily by Al Qaeda, but by other nations or organizations that we are spying on. And so to rule out the possibility that there are people in the intelligence community that are doing this to help Al Qaeda, I think, would be naive.”

Hmm. So then it’s naive to rule out the possibility that Hoekstra, now in the business of leaking classified information to the press about al-Qaeda sympathizers being surveilled, is “doing this to help al-Qaeda.” Good to know.