Keep An Eye On The Weather

Representative Pete Hoekstra write on the dangers of Environmental 'Intelligence'? in today's Wall Street Journal (sub req):

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.

Radical Islam? Nothing to worry about. Climate change, that's where the real threat to Western Civilization lies.