Republican says US readying crackdown on leaks
Tue Jul 11, 2006 8:32 PM ET



By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration is preparing a crackdown on intelligence leaks to the media and will try to pursue prosecutions in some recent cases, the chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee on Tuesday.

Michigan Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra also suggested some unauthorized leaks could have been deliberate attempts to help al Qaeda.

"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," he said.

"I don't have any evidence. But from my perspective, when you have information that is leaked that is clearly helpful to our enemy, you cannot discount that possibility," he added.

In recent months, two major intelligence operations were leaked to the media: the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and the Treasury Department's tracking of international banking transactions.

"There will be a renewed effort by the Justice Department in a couple of these cases to go through the entire process ... so they can prosecute," Hoekstra said in a speech to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Justice Department officials were not immediately available for comment.

Hoekstra also said the newly-installed CIA director Michael Hayden was conducting aggressive internal investigations against leakers.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck declined to comment on investigations but said Hayden believes greater communication within the agency could eliminate staff frustrations that lead to leaks.

Hoekstra, a staunch ally of President George W. Bush on most intelligence issues, broke with the president in May when he sent the White House an angry letter complaining that his committee had been kept in the dark about still other secret programs, until whistle blowers in the intelligence community told him about them.

In his letter to Bush, Hoekstra said that the U.S. Congress "simply should not have to play 'Twenty Questions' to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution."