Posted on 11/13/2004 7:05:38 AM PST by FairOpinion
Now that he's been returned to office, President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration.
At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. officials, who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the president's Iraq policy. There were leaks of prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of interagency memos. In mid-September, somebody leaked a C.I.A. report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior C.I.A. official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world.
White House officials concluded that they could no longer share important arguments and information with intelligence officials. They had to parse every syllable in internal e-mail. One White House official says it felt as if the C.I.A. had turned over its internal wastebaskets and fed every shred of paper to the press.
The White House-C.I.A. relationship became dysfunctional, and while the blame was certainly not all on one side, Langley was engaged in slow-motion, brazen insubordination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory.
As the presidential race heated up, the C.I.A. permitted an analyst - who, we now know, is Michael Scheuer - to publish anonymously a book called "Imperial Hubris," which criticized the Iraq war. Here was an official on the president's payroll publicly campaigning against his boss. As Scheuer told The Washington Post this week, "As long as the book was being used to bash the president, they [the C.I.A. honchos] gave me carte blanche to talk to the media."
Nor is this feud over. C.I.A. officials are now busy undermining their new boss, Porter Goss. One senior official called one of Goss's deputies, who worked on Capitol Hill, a "Hill Puke," and said he didn't have to listen to anything the deputy said. Is this any way to run a superpower?
Meanwhile, members of Congress and people around the executive branch are wondering what President Bush is going to do to punish the mutineers. A president simply cannot allow a department or agency to go into campaign season opposition and then pay no price for it. If that happens, employees of every agency will feel free to go off and start their own little media campaigns whenever their hearts desire.
If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes. As it is, the answer to the C.I.A. insubordination is not just to move a few boxes on the office flow chart.
The answer is to define carefully what the president expects from the intelligence community: information. Policy making is not the C.I.A.'s concern. It is time to reassert some harsh authority so C.I.A. employees know they must defer to the people who win elections, so they do not feel free at meetings to spout off about their contempt of the White House, so they do not go around to their counterparts from other nations and tell them to ignore American policy.
In short, people in the C.I.A. need to be reminded that the person the president sends to run their agency is going to run their agency, and that if they ever want their information to be trusted, they can't break the law with self-serving leaks of classified data.
This is about more than intelligence. It's about Bush's second term. Is the president going to be able to rely on the institutions of government to execute his policies, or, by his laxity, will he permit the bureaucracy to ignore, evade and subvert the decisions made at the top? If the C.I.A. pays no price for its behavior, no one will pay a price for anything, and everything is permitted. That, Mr. President, is a slam-dunk.
Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error.
" Time to clean up both the CIA and State."
I couldn't agree with you more.
It might be related to the management style of Patrick Murray.
Then, when they're done there, send them over to State.
"You have sat here too long for the good you do. In the name of God, go!"
Bush senior was in charge of the CIA at one time....many good, decent agents but it is obvious from the top brass down this group has a terminal case of "cancer" and long overdue to rid the bad seeds...if it starts with most going, so be it...I am concerned at what damage has been done already...but it's never too late...if they were wise....they would start packing...Bush has nothing to lose and all to gain!!!
You make your case privately, not in a politically damaging way to the President. Those people politicized the CIA; they should be fired.
And Acting Director McLaughlin just announced his resignation "for personal reasons".
No, they need to be fired, in wholesale lots. We can get much better people. They have performed just abysmally over the past decade, have undergone regulatory capture, in effect. We need a systematic purge and new faces, not lectures to the existing useful idiots.
There's going to be a house cleaning. 60-80 CIA folks are to be fired this month. Upon the removal of these creeps, the CIA will once again be pro-American. Thanks CIA Director.
The recently appointed head of the Directorate of Operations (spy side of the CIA)Stephen Kappes turned in his resignation because he didn't want to be bossed around by a guy Goss brought in to help him, Patrick Murray. Murray may have overplayed his hand.
Kappes is a person who can recruit agents. He is a professional who came into the CIA from the Marines. He speaks Russian and Farsi. He ran a Russian intelligence officer, a linguist, who spoke an African language. He probably also recruited others, but this guy was finally caught by the Russians so we know about it.
The White House asked Kappes not to resign.
I predict that Goss will have to put a leash in his underling Patrick Murray. Murray didn't do too well when he worked at the CIA and is now back trying to lord it over others because of his patron.
Bush is a strong leader. It won't be easy, but if anyone can bring them around, it is him.
Absolutely dead-on, FairOp.
When pressed to admit mistakes in the 3rd debate, Pres. Bush mentioned the appointment of some unnamed persons to government posts. While most thought of O'Neill at Treasury or Bremer's short-term predecessor in Iraq (so short I can't even remember his name!), the retention of Tenet also springs to mind. Via leaks to the Washington Post, CIA elements have acted as a loose-cannon 5th column against our sitting President. Another example can be found in the Drudge link to the WaPo this morning to yet another article demeaning Porter Goss. Goss has the toughest job in Washington right now......fighting an entrenched bureaucracy extremely hostile to change in an organization where poor results scream out for change. This is going to be a huge fight with high stakes. Brooks is so right in this article, and I hope he and others stay on top of it.
Seems they didn't dig far enough to root out Aldridge Ames sympathizers.
Your example of Kappes is what concerns me, that Murray may be alienating the good guys, and they will leave, and the rotten apples, who should be fired are the ones, who will just lay low and survive.
"If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes."
".....It is time to reassert some harsh authority so C.I.A......"
Live long enough in a "non-primitive" age and people forget what is behind respect for authority and the rules that govern us all.
It is good if all people remember and respect, but if they don't it is NECCESSARY to have a few "heads on spikes".
I don't expect anything to be done about this because ANOTHER result of living in a "non-primitive" age is forgetting how (or even why) to crack the whip.
Porter Goss served on the Intelligence Committee.
He knows where the stinkers are in the CIA.
He has his minions in there kicking their buts and encouraging them to leave.
The troublemakers are a bunch of Clintonista plants and they need to be purged.
Brookes is the NYT's token conservative .. take a deep breath.
Amen. Start with that back-stabber Richard Armitage and go down his chain of command cleaning house.
They believe themselves to be the true leaders of American Foreign Policy and when they have a President with whom they disagree (read: Republican) they hunker down and wait them out all the while feeding storys to the NYT and WaPo.
I do not trust Armitage one bit.
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