The Company Humors the Congressional Dons

WASHINGTON - The CIA is gleaning intelligence from an unusual source: Congress. House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said the agency has become more willing to consider sensitive information that comes from his oversight committee — a shift he's seen in recent months under CIA Director Porter Goss.

Without being specific about who is giving his panel the information, Hoekstra said the intelligence tips have touched on several current issues, including terrorism, al-Qaida, Iraq and Iran. Hoekstra said he has personally met with individuals and organizations in different places around the world.

"Obviously, I can't do analysis," he said. "I can't tell whether these sources are any good or not, but I do know that they are unconventional sources of information."

In the past, Hoekstra said, these sources would have been discounted in the "sifting process" at the CIA because they came from Congress.

"This is not where we normally get information," Hoekstra said. "But Porter is more than willing — and encouraging — to take a serious look at these sources to see what value they might have."

Hoekstra said individuals with potentially useful information sometimes can't figure out how to gain access to U.S. intelligence agencies, and the committee has developed a reputation for providing that opening. He was vague about the nature of his contacts.

A CIA clandestine service officer in the 1960s, Goss served as the House Intelligence chairman for nearly eight years ending in August 2004. One of his aides declined comment Tuesday.

The CIA and other U.S. spy agencies have been highly criticized recently by intelligence commissions for failing to collect information on some of the country's most pressing problems, including terror groups and the weapons programs of Iran and North Korea.

In a report this spring, President Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction encouraged the development of new and innovative spying techniques at U.S. agencies that have shown "too little innovation to succeed in the 21st century."

During the last six to eight months, Hoekstra said his committee has shared information with the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and White House National Security Council. He said he encourages those offices to develop their own relationship with the sources.

"We are not in the business of maintaining our own set of contacts around the world," Hoekstra said of his committee. "We can't do that — not at all."

The CIA devotes significant energy toward developing relationships with individuals who have access to intelligence and then protecting their identities.

Hoekstra's sources could stem from any number of contacts made inside or outside Washington.

Congress members, especially the House Intelligence Committee, take official trips to meet with members of foreign governments, interest groups and individuals. For instance, Hoekstra and other intelligence committee members spent Congress' August break hop-scotching from Great Britain to Egypt to Jordan to Iraq.

This would be pretty funny if it also wasn't so ridiculously serious.

I'm sure intelligent men such as Tom "I am the Government" DeLay can supplement the Company with all kinds of Intelligence. DeLay, after all is very tight with Abramoff's Organization, and Abramoff has friends who can make an intelligence offer you can't refuse.

Here's a bit of Intelligence the Company needs to think about. It is certain Goss won't send any Agents on assignment to check it out. But I doubt DeLay's substitute Don Blunt knows much about it either:

The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in a century, continuing a trend toward less summer ice that is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, various experts on the region said today.

The findings are consistent with recent computer simulations showing that a buildup of smokestack and tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases could lead to a profoundly transformed Arctic later this century in which much of the once ice-locked ocean is routinely open water in summers.

It also appears that the change is becoming self sustaining, with the increased open water absorbing solar energy that would be reflected back into space by bright white ice, said Ted A. Scambos, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., which compiled the data along with NASA.

"Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold," Dr. Scambos said. "The consecutive record-low extents make it pretty certain a long-term decline is underway."

The North Pole ice cap always grows in winter and shrinks in the summer, but the new summer low, measured on Sept. 19th, was 20 percent below the average minimum ice extent measured from 2000 back to 1978, when precise satellite mapping of the ice began, the snow and ice center reported.

The difference between the average ice area and the area that persisted this summer was about 500,000 square miles, or twice the size of Texas, the scientists said.

This summer was the fourth in a row with ice extents sharply below the long-term average, said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the snow and ice center and a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

A natural cycle in the polar atmosphere, the Arctic Oscillation, that contributed to the reduction in Arctic ice in the past was not a significant factor right now, he said, adding that rising temperatures driven by accumulating greenhouse-gas emissions had to be playing a role.

He and other scientists said that there could be more variability ahead, including some years in which the sea ice will grow. But they have found few hints that other factors, like more Arctic cloudiness in a warming world, might reverse the trend.

"With all that dark open water, you start to see an increase in Arctic Ocean heat storage," Dr. Serreze said. "Come autumn and winter that makes it a lot harder to grow ice, and the next spring you're left with less and thinner ice. And it's easier to lose even more the next year..."