Remember 9/11, when Sen. Hatch just couldn’t keep himself from running from reporter to reporter spilling classified data in some insane attempt to paint himself as the hero of a party complicit in the terrorist attack by having trashed everything President Clinton had done? Yeah, good times, eh? Hey, where’s my missile defense shield? Isn’t that why we stopped chasing terrorists in 2001? I digress …

Well, here they go again …

From GQ Politics:

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.

A delegation led by House Minority Leader John A. Boehner , R-Ohio, arrived in Iraq earlier today, and because of Rep. Peter Hoekstra , R-Mich., the entire world — or at least Twitter.com readers—now know they’re there.

“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. A few media outlets, including Congressional Quarterly, learned about it, but agreed not to disclose anything until the delegation had left Iraq.

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.

This leads to a great question from Time.com’s Karen Tumulty:

I wonder: Does Osama bin Laden have a Twitter account?

UPDATE – Oh, this is great! From Think Progress comes a timely find from a 2006 op-ed in the LA Times, Hoekstra wrote:

But every time classified national security information is leaked, our ability to gather information on those who would do us harm is eroded. … I regret that I see little sign of intolerance for unauthorized disclosures of intelligence to the media from some of my Democratic colleagues today. … We are a nation at war. Unauthorized disclosures of classified information only help terrorists and our enemies – and put American lives at risk.

He’s more like Hatch than I thought!