Silvestre Reyes, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Congressional Quarterly's National Security Editor, Jeff Stein, interviewed the last man standing after House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi's holiday massacre of Reps. Jane Harman and Alcee Hastings.

From Stein's report:

Reyes stumbled when I asked him a simple question about al Qaeda at the end of a 40-minute interview in his office last week. Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East.

We warmed up with a long discussion about intelligence issues and Iraq. And then we veered into terrorism’s major players.

To me, it’s like asking about Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: Who’s on what side?

The dialogue went like this:

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.

That’s because the extremist Sunnis who make up al Qaeda consider all Shiites to be heretics.

Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots account for its very existence. Osama bin Laden and his followers believe the Saudi Royal family besmirched the true faith through their corruption and alliance with the United States, particularly allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil.

It’s been five years since these Muslim extremists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center.

Is it too much to ask that our intelligence overseers know who they are?

Apparently, it is.

*Begin non sequitir*
This incident reminded me of one of this blog's early days when I had my own, personal liberal stalker. He's so long gone that I no longer even remember his name, but he had attacked me in the months after 9/11 because in one of my posts I apparently said that the Iranians were Arabs. When I saw his charge, I thought: "Well, that was a major brain fart on my part, because I know the Iranians are ethnically Persian, not Arab."

Then I went back and looked at the post he was criticizing -- and it turns out I never referred to the Iranians as Arabs.
*End non sequitir*