Congressman Who Found Battlefield 2 & Team America: World Police Worrisome Creates a REAL Security Threat

Let's rewind to May of 2006 for a moment.

Back then Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) chaired the House Permanent Select Committe on Intelligence (these days he is the ranking Republican).

With Hoekstra holding the gavel, the Committee received a presentation from a highly-paid Pentagon defense contractor in which a gamer video created by a 25-year-old Dutch hospital employee was identified as an Al Qaida propaganda tool. As we reported on GamePolitics at the time:

The influential committee, chaired by Rep. Peter Hoekstra... watched footage of animated combat in which characters depicted as Islamic insurgents killed U.S. troops in battle. The video began with the voice of a male narrator saying, "I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters..."

Several GP readers immediately noticed that the voice-over was actually lifted from Team America: World Police, an outrageous 2004 satirical film produced by the creators of the popular South Park comedy series. At about the same time, gamers involved in the online Battlefield 2 community were pointing out the video footage shown to Congress was not [an Al Qaeda] mod of BF2 at all, but standard game footage from EA's Special Forces BF2 add-on module, a retail product widely available in the United States...

GamePolitics contacted Hoekstra's office, but no comment on the Committee's faux pas was offered.

That was then.

Late last week CQ Politics reported that Hoekstra completely blew the lid on tight security surrounding a secret fact-finding mission to Iraq:

A congressional trip to Iraq this weekend was supposed to be a secret. But the cat’s out of the bag now, thanks to a member of the House Intelligence Committee who broke an embargo via Twitter...

“Just landed in Baghdad,” messaged Hoekstra, a former chairman of the Intelligence panel and now the ranking member, who is routinely entrusted to keep some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets.

Before the delegation left Washington, they were advised to keep the trip to themselves for security reasons... Nobody expected, though, that a lawmaker with such an extensive national security background would be the first to break the silence. And in such a big way.

Not only did Hoekstra reveal the existence of the lawmakers’ trip, but included details about their itinerary in updates posted every few hours on his Twitter page, until he suddenly stopped, for some reason, on Friday morning.

GP: Looking at the bright side, I guess we can be cheered that members of Congress are catching on to Twitter...