Posted on 11/26/2004 2:45:56 PM PST by swilhelm73
PORTER GOSS was confirmed as director of central intelligence on September 22, 2004. That day, acting CIA director John McLaughlin said, "I know I speak for my colleagues at CIA and throughout the intelligence community in congratulating Porter Goss on his confirmation by the Senate as director of central intelligence."
It was a gracious statement from a man who had wanted the job. But in terms of accuracy it should go down as the latest in a long line of bogus CIA assessments. McLaughlin was not speaking on behalf of many of his colleagues at the CIA when he congratulated Goss on his confirmation.
As chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence for seven years, Goss had been highly critical of the agency, particularly its clandestine services. He arrived at Langley with reform of the stubborn CIA bureaucracy on his mind.
So within two weeks of McLaughlin's statement, current and former CIA officials started firing warning shots at their new boss. These ranged from disgraceful attempts to tarnish the personal reputation of Goss's associates, to silly stories of how Goss's team was being rude to oh-so-sensitive bureaucrats in Langley, to ridiculous claims that Goss was trying to politicize an agency that had become more politicized than either of our political parties.
These stories were fed to sympathetic and credulous reporters by operatives long schooled in the art of disinformation, and the media began to construct a narrative: Porter Goss and his heavy-handed band of Republicans had unfortunately come to carry out a partisan purge of an outstanding, effective, public-spirited agency.
Meanwhile, it turned out that Michael Scheuer, former head of the agency's bin Laden unit, had received permission from CIA leadership publicly (though anonymously) to criticize the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror through much of the last year--so long as that critique did not include harsh assessments of the performance of the intelligence community. That admission makes it much easier to understand the numerous CIA leaks against President Bush in September and October.
The good news is that the president is now fighting back. He wants change at the agency and is standing behind Goss. He knows that he cannot carry out a post-9/11 foreign policy with a pre-9/11 intelligence apparatus--and whatever constrained him from making changes over the past three years, those constraints seem gone. He knows the CIA needs dramatic reform, that the American people will welcome such reform, and even that they expect him to do it and to do it quickly. And he knows that those inside the CIA opposed to Goss's reforms will fight hard and will fight dirty.
So Bush and Goss are undeterred. When two senior CIA officials from the operations directorate challenged his authority earlier this month, Goss quickly made it clear that he would accept their resignations. They resigned. These are almost certainly the first of many personnel changes. Others will and should come quickly. And organizational changes will follow as well. There is much to do. Bush made clear he appreciates the urgency of the task with his November 18 order instructing Goss to vastly increase the size of the clandestine and analysis services at the agency "as soon as feasible."
But the improvements at the CIA must be both quantitative and qualitative. The CIA, and in particular its clandestine service, exists to penetrate enemies and collect their secrets. In recent years, it has signally failed in this task. The CIA never penetrated Saddam Hussein's inner circle or the senior levels of al Qaeda. Thus, analysts were clueless about much that was going on within al Qaeda and within Saddam Hussein's regime.
Porter Goss, with the strong backing of the president, should insist on major reform at the CIA. The more quickly he proceeds, and the more steadfastly the president backs him, the safer we'll all be.
It's about time. The National Law Enforcement Agencies have been corrupted by the Klinton Administration, placing key figures into key positions to essentially make these agencies ineffective. Now the cancers are being removed. Good riddance. Porter Goss needs to purge all of these agencies of Klinton appointees and quickly so that no more intelligence information can be leaked to their cronies in the "old media".
Scheuer did criticize the intelligence community, especially the higher-ups. And he especially criticized leaks that thwarted military operations.
Go! GOSS!! Clean out the RATS nest of Socialist that allowed our country to be attacked.
Next, Minetta at Dept. of Transportation must go.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/sfl-24forum24nov26,0,6673308.story?coll=sfla-news-opinion
"Michael Scheuer, chief of the bin Laden unit of the CIA's Counter-terrorism Center (and author of Imperial Hubris, revealing CIA internal dissent over Bush policies that he felt were fomenting terrorism and misdirecting the threat from al-Qaida to Saddam Hussein), has resigned, as has Deputy Director John McLaughlin."
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P1493,
"A report delivered by the Defense Science Board, an advisory committee to the US Defense Department, to the Office of the Secretary of Defense around the end of September has gotten very little media attention, maybe because, as Tom Shanker of the NYT writes, A harshly critical report by a Pentagon advisory panel says the United States is failing in its efforts to explain the nation's diplomatic and military actions to the Muslim world, but it warns that no public relations plan or information operation can defend America from flawed policies. Which rather sums up a point Michael Scheuer's Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror makes repeatedly. Of course the Bush administration didn't listen to him..."
The War on Terror is described by Thomas PM Barnett's book, The Pentagon's New War, at:
http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/index.htm
The War on Terror is the process of connecting the GAP to the rest of the world. In different places and times you use different methods to achieve connection. Michael Scheuer seems to me to be part of the old guard. They are most comfortable fighting the Cold War with the USSR. They advanced their careers during the time the CIA depended heavily on signals intelligence and satellite photographs, after itwas neutered in the last third of the twentieth century.
Michael Sheurer might have been the old guard but he was sure on the right track when the information on WMD's were given. The new guard, Chalabi and the Defense policy board, sure commited a nasty with their assessment.
The people leaving are not leakers or bureaucrats. they are the really great spies. Probably they told the administration things they didn't want to hear so they have to go. Goss' toadie Murray got his promotion to head boy at the Congressional Intelligence committee after his predecessor was smeared and committed suicide (?) in a bathtub at a motel in Fairfax VA. Now Murray has managed to destroy the CIA.
Bush wants a praetorian guard, not an intelligence service.
All of this stuff about leakers is a big smear.
Losing people like Stephen Kappes is a disaster.
Buh has his political butt covered, but that won't protect him or us from Osama. Kappes could have done that.
Scheur can't keep his stories straight.
Scheuer's Hubris
GeoPoliticalReview ^
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1290995/posts
Are they so good? Doubt it. Otherwise they'd be in the private sector, or volunteering. Impossible to be great at one's trade and hold a Federal tenured (or any tenured) sinecure. The inertia of pension and mega-copius federalatory perks is to impossible to surmount.
I agree, and it couldn't be soon enough! He's a POS!
Stephen Kappes was tops.
Thanks.
The opinion of one who has a low regard of the Bush administration. It is like praise from Ted Kennedy.
I voted for Bush.
Kappes ran a KGB Colonel who gave the US the names of many Russian spies, probably also Hanssen, the FBI official who was working for the KGB.
The Russian's name was Alexander Zaporozhskii.
Kappes was extremely highly regarded.
Alexander Zaporozhsky
This spelling seems to be on Internet.
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