Andrew C. McCarthy at The Corner ("a web-leading source of real-time conservative opinion") puts a smackdown on the DNI.
Quote(s):
"James Clapper, the head of intelligence for the United States of America, has explained to Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood is “largely secular.” It further has “eschewed violence,” decries al-Qaeda as a “perversion of Islam,” and really just wants “social ends” and “a betterment of the political order in Egypt.”"
&
"If this is what $40 billion–plus buys you, maybe Representative Ryan can make up the rest of that $100 billion by eliminating the intelligence community."
I don't happen to know the DNI personally, but a lot folks in the IC whom I do know speak of him with respect.
I haven't read the whole testimony, but one thing I can tell you is that what someone from the IC briefs an open meeting with the media present is not what he or she briefs behind closed doors where everyone inside has the appropriate security clearance. Unclassified briefings are, necessarily, somewhat dumbed-down, and they are so for very good reasons. Such reasons as not exposing the crown jewels of your best sources or means of collection, &tc., so as to make your source's lives shorter and riskier or to make it easier for an adversary to fool or evade your intelligence capabilities.
(The reader may recall, or is invited to discover, why it is that Osama Bin Ladin no longer uses a cellular or satellite telephone.)
That being said, the MB (like Hamas, like Hezbollah) uses the disfunction or disinterest of the legal government and authorities wherever they are to buy legitimacy by providing social services. In other words, they go secular and they do so in a very deliberate, very public way. It's not fake, the medical or social safety net they erect is quite real, and in an environment (such as Egypt) where the overtly political and violent aims of the MB are quite ruthlessly quashed, this sort of thing is much less likely to get one a date with the security ministries interrogators.
With that in mind, it may be that reporting on the DNI's testimony is a little slanted, a little incomplete, and that maybe all that shocked reaction on the part of committee members was just the slightest, teensiest bit stage-managed.
(Not that there's ever any stagecraft and drama practiced in the public eye on Capitol Hill. Perish the thought.)
