There's so much happening it's hard to know where to begin. Bush's leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency has basically been a disaster from almost everyone's point of view, including people in his own party.
(Background: Lefties in the US tend to place the agency somewhere in the 9th circle of hell for its covert activities over the course of its existences, toppling democratically elected regimes in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and helping put into place regimes--usually military dictatorships--friendly to "US"/multinational corporate interests. Links can be provided on request or others should feel free to take up this line.)
Bush's most recent appointee, Peter Goss, a former congressman, lasted only months, but in that short time alienated many long-term CIA officials who then resigned in protest, by a) being both incompetent and engaging in deeply dubious activities, and b) spending most of his time on witch hunts within the agency trying to root out the people who were blowing whistles on the problems and things like the illegal prisons, etc.
Additionally, some of the people he brought in with him, including the #3 in charge, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo (a name for the ages, really), have had very spotty records. Foggo himself is now being investigated on several criminal counts both by the agency and the government--illegal contracts to friends and apparently a sex scandal involving prostitutes at the, um... Watergate Hotel.
So, on Friday Goss quietly resigned, giving no reason except apparently to say it's just "just one of those mysteries" (Cryptic, even by Washington standards, but slightly more influenced by Cole Porter than usual.)
Part II: The Replacement. Here's the NYTimes' editorial on the subject today:
The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee said on Sunday that Gen. Michael Hayden, President Bush's choice to succeed Porter Goss at the Central Intelligence Agency, is "the wrong person, the wrong place, at the wrong time." While this page hasn't found too much common ground with the Congressional Republican leadership lately, that assessment, by Representative Peter Hoekstra, is a hard one to quibble with.
By almost all accounts, General Hayden, a four-star Air Force general, has an excellent reputation on Capitol Hill. Much has been made of his ability to brief well — that is to say, his ability to explain to lay people in the administration and Congress what American wiretaps and intelligence show about threats around the world. He led the National Security Agency from 1999 until 2005, and he is credited with taking an agency that once concentrated on the cold war and refocusing it on terrorism.
But the next director of the C.I.A. needs to know the business of espionage, and what General Hayden knows is gadgets, not people. The most important thing a director of the C.I.A. must understand is how to use human intelligence. The Bush administration's vision of the agency's future would push that further, and have the agency focus almost entirely on gathering information on the ground while others concentrate on high-tech spying and analyzing data. It's therefore peculiar that the White House immediately reached out to General Hayden, whose background is far from what would seem to be required.
Recruiting spies is different from eavesdropping, the skill that General Hayden honed at the National Security Agency. In fact, he's been spending time lately defending the agency's wiretaps of Americans without warrants.
After The New York Times disclosed last December that the White House was wiretapping without getting warrants, the international calls and e-mail of people in the United States, General Hayden piped up as part of the White House's scripted defense of the program. The nation needs a C.I.A. director who has both a sensitivity to civil liberties issues and a willingness to buck any administration that wants to trample them. The president, clearly, wants exactly the opposite.
It also seems ill advised to put an Air Force general at the helm of the C.I.A., a civilian agency, at a time when it is fending off the Pentagon's efforts to expand its own spying operations. Morale at the C.I.A. is at an all-time low, and the choice of General Hayden sends a politically tone-deaf signal to the men and women in the field who themselves are fending off encroachment from the Pentagon.
There's no question that the C.I.A. needs reform after the successive catastrophic intelligence failures of 9/11 and Iraq. Porter Goss's abrupt departure after an unusually brief tenure is welcome; Mr. Goss, a former congressman, was obsessed with rooting out whistle-blowers, a campaign that didn't do much for morale at the depleted agency.
Mr. Goss's departure has opened up the opportunity for new and creative approaches to intelligence. We dearly hope that Arlen Specter, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, who routinely promises to ask tough questions of nominees only to lie down and roll over once hearings are convened, will surprise the country this time and take a hard look at General Hayden. President Bush did the country, and the C.I.A., a disservice in his appointment of Mr. Goss; he now seems determined to make the same mistake twice.
The Washington Post's longer assessment of the Agency's dire situation, from Saturday, ends on this ominous quotation from that well known liberal, retired Army Lt. Gen. Donald Kerrick, a former deputy national security adviser and once a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency.: "Rumsfeld rules the roost now." |
