Rush Holt for House Intel Committee Chair

The Washington insiders have been presenting the House Intelligence Committee chair contest as a choice between Jane Harman and Alcee Hastings, and has made it clear who their favored candidate is: Harman is sensible and experienced, they say, while Hastings is allegedly criminal and corrupt.  Furthermore they tend to suggest that only some kind of catty female emotional dispute is preventing Speaker Pelosi from doing the right thing and naming Harman.

As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, it was never a two-person contest, and as of today we know that Hastings will not be named.  It seems clear that Harman will not be named either.  Fortunately we have an ideal candidate for the job, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ).  I'll explain why on the flip.

First off, Rep. Holt passes the basic test: he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning.

But the real qualification that makes him ideal is that he has a Ph.D. in physics and he's an arms control expert (see his biography).  To see what a difference real scientific chops can make, consider the situation Sen. Jay Rockefeller found himself in in 2003 when he was briefed on the NSA's wiretapping program but wasn't allowed to share his concerns, but wasn't confident enough in his own understanding of the program to be certain his concerns were correct.

See, when the spooks have something really, really secret to reveal, the intellgence committees use a procedure where only the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees get briefed.  They cannot take notes, they cannot consult staff, they can't tell anyone what they found out.  Yet this passes for oversight.  Holt would have been in a much better position than Rockefeller to grill and cross-examine the DoD and the NSA on the implications of their program.

What this means is that when the Democrats oversee the NSA, they need to make sure that someone who combines good judgment and a technical education is in the room.  Fortunately, we've got the guy; his name is Rush Holt.  With his background in arms control and the sciences, you're not going to snow him with unsupportable claims about Iranian WMD.