Posted on 08/12/2004 6:58:38 AM PDT by Former Military Chick
In nominating U.S. Rep. Porter Goss to be the next director of Central Intelligence, President Bush has chosen a man very capable of heading the nation's intelligence community. While the job for which Rep. Goss has been nominated may soon be redefined, the president does not have the luxury of time in the midst of a war to postpone leadership decisions until all disputes about the future structure of intelligence have been decided.
Rep. Goss, a former intelligence officer, is doubly qualified to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, the Florida Republican is already intimately informed about the agency, and has been deeply immersed in the post-9/11 and post-Iraq invasion efforts to identify intelligence weaknesses. In Congress, Rep. Goss has come across as blunt and candid. Furthermore, he clearly has the confidence of the president, who had already asked him to deliver a public critique of the foreign policy platform of Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry.
While some Democrats are arguing that the top intelligence official should be politically neutral, the key element is whether he is competent, trusted and gives unvarnished advice on intelligence questions. No matter how polished a professional he may be, it is the personal relationship with the president that counts in making the officeholder effective. And it is the president's ability to fire his aides that makes them accountable.
Rep. Goss' Senate nomination hearing will undoubtedly become a forum for the debate on reorganizing intelligence. Some advocates of the national 9/11 Commission have already suggested that they will only support Rep. Goss if he, like Sen. Kerry, fully embraces its recommendations. That's another way of saying they'll likely vote against him since it is well known that President Bush gives only partial support to those recommendations, and has left room for debate about details.
What the 9/11 Commission's favored solution, or the other major alternatives under discussion, would do to the CIA is not clear. The CIA collects human intelligence but leaves the job of technical intelligence collection via satellites and aircraft to the Department of Defense.
In addition to carrying out covert political-military operations, the CIA brings together experts from across the government to produce "National Intelligence Estimates," containing the distilled judgments of the entire intelligence community. Porter Goss is well equipped to preserve and enhance its key functions during the reorganization turmoil that lies ahead.
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Boston Globe
http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_action=doc&p_docid=10468757DE7E0CE3&p_docnum=1
August 11, 2004
Poor Choice For The CIA
THE SEPT. 11 commission last month harshly criticized both US intelligence services and the congressional committees that were supposed to oversee them. Now President Bush has picked the longtime House chairman of one of those ineffectual committees, Republican Porter Goss of Florida, to succeed George Tenet as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The timing of the nomination is also questionable. The effort to upgrade US intelligence capability would be better served by postponing selection of a new CIA chief until after the election. The winner Nov. 2 would then be able to advance his plan for reforming intelligence and pick the best people for the top positions.
Although Goss has been mentioned frequently as a successor to Tenet since his resignation last month, little in his record suggests that he has the vision or the resolve needed for either the CIA job or the new position of overall intelligence czar recommended by the 9/11 commission. Two of the intelligence services' greatest failures -- the inability to penetrate Al Qaeda before Sept. 11 and the misjudgment that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2003 -- happened while Goss chaired the House Intelligence Committee. According to the commission report, congressional overseers like Goss did not require intelligence service officials to spell out and adhere to long-term programs for addressing threats posed by Al Qaeda.
(excerpt please click link for full article)
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Detroit Free Press August 11, 2004
CIA Appointment
Bush's pick must put security over politics
President George W. Bush proved himself a brilliant politician Tuesday, naming U.S. Rep. Porter Goss the new CIA chief.
Though Goss' name had been bandied about for months, many people thought his candidacy was dead because he's too political. A former spy himself, the Florida Republican has urged caution about pushing forward too fast on the 9/11 commission's recommendations and been defensive about the nation's undercover operatives.
Those beleaguered agents no doubt appreciate the support of their presumptive boss. But Goss did not temper his comments Tuesday with an embrace of the changes that must be made. Does he have what it takes to stand up to the spy corps with which he still identifies so strongly?
Goss' partisanship -- he's a lead critic of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's positions on intelligence -- is something Senate lawmakers will have to vet thoroughly. Amid myriad concerns that the pre-Iraq war intelligence was colored by politics, the CIA director must be assiduously apolitical.
So, too, Goss' viewpoints on revamping the information-gathering community will need close examination, particularly if he might use his CIA leadership to try to block giving the new national intelligence director any meaningful authority.
It might have made sense to figure out what the intelligence czar's job will entail before naming a new CIA chief, as it will no doubt affect the job description. Acting Chief John McLaughlin appears to be keeping the ship steady.
But Bush has backed Congress into a corner. If lawmakers don't give Goss a quick green light, Bush can accuse them -- particularly Democrats -- of dragging their feet. One of the 9/11 commission's biggest criticisms targeted Congress for taking too long to act on key appointments and other intelligence issues.
Shrewd move. Still, the Senate must make certain Goss has the goods to do the critical job of directing the information-gathering necessary to keep the country safe.
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Detroit News August 12, 2004
CIA Needs Major Reform No Matter Who Gets Top Job
President Bush nominates former spy as head of the intelligence agency
There is no doubt the Central Intelligence Agency needs reforming. And the appointment of Porter Goss as CIA chief would give the agency a leader with dual credentials: extensive experience both inside and outside spycraft.
Goss has been a spy, working undercover for some 10 years in Europe and Latin America, and deployed in the Florida Straits during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
He is also a congressman from Florida, a job that makes him attuned to public sentiment on intelligence matters, compared with spies who never left the profession.
This range of experience could prove valuable as government retools the CIA and other spy agencies.
As a former spy, Goss is not likely to rely solely on satellites and other high-tech devices that failed to catch Osama bin Laden or to correctly size up Iraq.
Agents on the ground will be needed to make the United States secure. Homeland defense starts overseas in a number of critical areas, including securing 11 million cargo containers that enter the United States every year.
It’s impossible to inspect them all. And that makes it important to cultivate informants who might tip agents to smuggled weapons.
The problem is not theoretical. Each container is 40 feet long and could hide the smallest nuclear weapon, which weighs about 60 pounds and can be stashed in a suitcase.
Whoever gets the CIA post should concentrate on spycraft and correcting mistakes that led to well-documented intelligence failures.
The appointment requires Senate approval and, unfortunately, has already ignited partisan sniping.
Retired Admiral Stansfield Turner, who supports John Kerry for president, said Tuesday that Goss was appointed to “help George Bush win votes in Florida.”
Or lose votes, depending on what most Florida voters think of Goss. On the face of it, any nominee for the job would be from a state Bush and Kerry want to win. Turner simply ignored Goss’ decades of credentials.
Others say Goss might be too much of a CIA insider.
The key should be his imagination. The September 11 panel urged imagination to determine what Osama bin Laden might do next. That is, imagine the worst and then imagine all the ways the worst can be delivered to American shores.
Before September 11, using airplanes as missiles was known to be technically possible. But it was believed unlikely because of the logistics involved, and no one could imagine a hatred of Americans large enough to kill 3,000 people at once.
Americans now know better.
Besides being a former spy, Goss is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He has seen the U.S. spy effort from the bottom to the top.
That could give him a head start on needed reforms. Confirmation hearings will no doubt reveal problems with the appointment, if any.
But confirming the appointment should be based on Goss’ skills and experience, not on election-year politics. And making the CIA more effective should be the first job of the nominee, whoever that may be.
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Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0408110124aug11,1,1641650.story
August 11, 2004
Coming In From The Cold
Two years ago, U.S. Rep. Porter Goss told a Florida magazine how a mistaken turn at a Yale University jobs fair influenced his career. Goss had intended to chat up a representative of the metals company that employed his father. "I went left instead of right and I walked into the wrong room, and the guys in the wrong room were the CIA," Goss told the Lee County Times of the Islands. The Central Intelligence Agency liked the idea of an ROTC cadet with language skills. After graduating from Yale, Goss spent two years in Army intelligence and roughly a decade as a clandestine officer for the CIA.
Now he may return to the agency he long served. President Bush's nomination Tuesday of Goss to head the CIA is a signal that the president intends to move forward with the intelligence overhaul this nation urgently needs. Some Republicans had counseled waiting until after the November presidential election to name a new CIA chief. That delay would stall a Senate confirmation debate that now gives Democrats an opening to criticize executive branch oversight of the intelligence community.
Bush evidently would rather risk that politically charged cacophony than keep the CIA, which former Director George Tenet left last month, in a leaderless limbo. The confirmation process should demonstrate whether Goss is the right person for the job. But what's more important than his confirmation or rejection is the determination of the White House to get cracking on the intelligence shortcomings described in those fat reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Sept. 11 commission.
The choice of Goss, an eight-term Republican congressman who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, left some of Bush's critics sputtering that Goss was (a) too much a politician rather than an intelligence guru, or (b) too close to the CIA to shake up its culture. The temptation is to respond: Choose one knock or the other, but you can't have both.
The evidence suggests that Goss does have an independent streak. The 2004 edition of the non-partisan Almanac of American Politics quotes Goss as saying, "I've got to be harsher [on the CIA] than the next guy because I was in the business." In June, his committee issued a report that eviscerated the agency for "its misallocation and redirection of resources, poor prioritization of objectives, micromanagement of field operations, and a continued political aversion to operational risk."
What's more, Goss has street cred for demanding, well before the terrorist attacks of 2001, that the U.S. increase its spending on intelligence. He believed too many members of Congress naively saw the end of the Cold War as the extinction of dangerous international threats.
The creation of a national intelligence czar--a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission that Bush has endorsed--probably would change what it means to be director of the CIA. But this nation's sworn enemies won't wait for Washington to fiddle with bureaucracies as they plot to make it burn. By nominating Porter Goss, the White House has signaled Congress that it intends to press ahead with the needed reforms in American intelligence, election year or no.
The evidence suggests that Goss does have an independent streak. The 2004 edition of the non-partisan Almanac of American Politics quotes Goss as saying, "I've got to be harsher [on the CIA] than the next guy because I was in the business." In June, his committee issued a report that eviscerated the agency for "its misallocation and redirection of resources, poor prioritization of objectives, micromanagement of field operations, and a continued political aversion to operational risk."
What's more, Goss has street cred for demanding, well before the terrorist attacks of 2001, that the U.S. increase its spending on intelligence. He believed too many members of Congress naively saw the end of the Cold War as the extinction of dangerous international threats.
The creation of a national intelligence czar--a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission that Bush has endorsed--probably would change what it means to be director of the CIA. But this nation's sworn enemies won't wait for Washington to fiddle with bureaucracies as they plot to make it burn. By nominating Porter Goss, the White House has signaled Congress that it intends to press ahead with the needed reforms in American intelligence, election year or no.
(excerpt please click link for full article)
Differing thoughts on the new CIA director.
It will make no difference who Bush picks, the Rats will not like him or her.
I heard this morning that Nancy Pelosi stated in an interview six months ago that Goss would be a perfect fit for the new CIA director opening, as he's fair minded and not heavy handed into partisan politics, and after having worked with him before, she feels he would do the right thing.
Now, she's saying he's totally unfit for the job, and that it is a totally partisan appointment.
The flip-flopping is contagious!
Thanks for the ping.
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