Environmental 'Intelligence'?

By PETER HOEKSTRA
May 10, 2007 ; Page A16

Here we go again. The 2008 intelligence authorization bill, which the House may vote on this week, diverts CIA and other intelligence resources away from critical terrorism-related missions to study global climate change. If it becomes law, the legislation will force agencies to complete a National Intelligence Estimate with a 30-year assessment on the effects of environmental change within nine months.

We've been down this road before. In the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton's first Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, declared that environmental concerns and national security would share equal status in U.S. foreign policy. Immediately following that announcement, CIA Director John Deutch said in July 1996 that the U.S. was diverting spy satellites to photograph "ecologically sensitive" sites.

This was in the heady days that followed the Cold War, when our beleaguered intelligence community -- considered passé, downsized and suffering under the strain of budget cuts -- was searching for a politically popular mission.

Instead of focusing on looming national security threats -- the first World Trade Center bombing came in 1993 and in August of 1996 Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa, "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places" -- Mr. Deutch was currying favor with then-Vice President Al Gore.

George Tenet, Mr. Deutch's successor at the CIA, notes in his new book "At the Center of the Storm," Mr. Gore's interest in "wonkish" issues that he refers to as "bugs and bunnies." What Mr. Tenet fails to mention is that he kept open the ultimate expression of the politically correct "Deutch doctrine," the Director of Central Intelligence Environmental Center.

The Center had ordered intelligence analysts and collectors to write about volcano eruptions, fish schools and air pollution. And it also produced an annual Earth Day edition of the highly classified President's Daily Brief.

At the direction of the Center, spy satellites were tasked to conduct what some in the press dubbed "environmental peeking." The diversion meant fewer overhead images of vital national security concerns, such as Iran , North Korea and al Qaeda. It's impossible to know, but I wonder what intelligence clues in the run up to 9/11 were missed because our spy satellites were focused on the polar ice caps and schools of fish instead of Afghanistan and bin Laden.

Now House Democrats want to return to the days when the CIA wasted valuable resources on "bugs and bunnies." My objection is not about the validity of global climate change. I am concerned about whether it is an intelligence issue. Does it require analysts to make assessments using classified information that can only be acquired from sensitive human sources and billion-dollar spy satellites? Does it take holding a high-level security clearance and reviewing information in high-security, classified offices to write assessments about the environment?

The answer to these questions is no, at least according to one Democratic House Intelligence Committee staff member. The aide, who did not want to be named, told the Associated Press that, "a vast majority of the information used by intelligence analysts could come from unclassified, openly available sources and data in the government's possession." Why then divert intelligence assets to collect it?

The Democrats' 2008 intelligence authorization bill is a throwback to the mistakes of the 1990s when scarce resources were diverted to issues that clearly were not related to the businesses of intelligence. There was a mistaken belief then that serious threats to U.S. national security diminished or disappeared with the end of the Cold War. Intelligence spending was slashed in what was called then a post-Cold War "peace dividend."

I fear the intelligence authorization being voted on by Congress demonstrates some of the same short-sightedness of the 1990s. While Democrats call for U.S. intelligence agencies to study global climate change, they continue to grossly underestimate the terrorist threat. They willfully ignore or play down world-wide activity by radical jihadists, including this week's arrest in New Jersey of six men -- who may have been influenced by al Qaeda terrorist training tapes -- for allegedly planning to kill hundreds of soldiers at Fort Dix and other military installations in the Northeast. This past weekend, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, in a videotape message, mocked Democratic legislation to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq as a sign of American weakness and mentioned using Afghanistan and Iraq as bases to launch attacks.

The world remains a dangerous place. We need to spend our limited intelligence dollars wisely. We need our intelligence analysts focused on threats that require clandestine effort and classified information, such as rogue state weapons of mass destruction programs, al Qaeda and threats to American lives.

Let other federal agencies, as more than a dozen already do, cover the "bugs and bunnies." But let our spies be spies.

Mr. Hoekstra is a Republican congressman from Michigan and a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.