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.
The Joseph Wilson Niger setup should be viewed in this light, as just another piece of a highly-coordinated attack by factions within the CIA against the Bush administration (and, by extension, against US strategic interests). When can we expect the NY Times to go back and correct the record?
Better work fast Mr. President!
From one not familiar with 'how things work' in Washington.
Say you identify the 'bad guys'. In an environment of civil servants and Federal Workers Unions; how do you "clean house"?
I agree. IIRC slick fired almost every rep in DC and replaced them with incompetent buddies.
President Bush has too much class too fire men who are doing their job so he let slicks pals stay and the dems are low life immoral SOB's. He needs to get rid of everyone of these slick holdovers.
We are done with seeing any respect from the dems. When they get office again they wont think twice about firing all reps.
Armitage. That name sounds familiar. Who is he again?
"They should be fired."
They should be in a federal penitentiary.
"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."
I would argue that a politicized intelligence agency is worse than useless. It it their job to find and report information as accurately as possible. It is not their job to run the country.
bump
"C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory."
In the name of mercy, why??
As I remember it, during the 80's Casey had to create a secret CIA within the CIA in order to get around all the pro-Soviet thinking in the agency. CIA people are often elite university graduates/gov't workers--in other words, leftists. The following book has lots of info on reasons the CIA needs a good housecleaning.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060580127/qid=1100361995/sr=2-2/ref=pd_ka_b_2_2/104-3413934-6624757
Bush vs. the Beltway : How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror
by Laurie Mylroie
5.56mm
Tenet was Bush's Weakest Link..he's gone..McLaughlin is NOW the Weakenst Link...he's going....some of his deputies are going..thank God, and Porter Goss is going to play HARDBALL..I hope.
"Here was an official on the president's payroll publicly campaigning against his boss."
Of course this was true of Kerry's sister, Peggy, who is on the government payroll--and who furiously campaigned and fundraised for her brother.
The sad thing is if we lose good people, it hurts the American people who these CIA people are to protect with intelligence. These are very smart people with huge egos who do not want anything they say questioned. Many have certainly messed up but it was not all their fault.
If there are bad people, dump them out of patriotism, they owe the CIA info on what they know.
I watched during recent Iraq hearings when Mylroie took on the CIA analyst (since retired) who handled the Iraq portfolio in the mid-nineteen nineties. Mylroie's assertions were disputed at every opportunity by the CIA harridan. Unflortunately, for the CIA defendant Mylroie has been found to be right and the CIA wrong on a whole host of Iraqi issues.
BTTT
Prolly won't happen.. Bush has the "I'm a unite'er not a divider" disease.. when division is the wise choice. Keeping Tenent and other Clinton appointees shows Bush is a sick man.. Not as sick as Kerry, but hes a sick dude with a different disease.
Bush's disease is the disease of "appeasement", because thats exactly what I'm a unite'er not a divider" MEANS.... Laymen miss that diagnosis.. George Bush is an appeaser just like his father and brother are.. Worse I'm partially at fault for electing him since I literally had no other choice.. Kerry's disease is contagious though .. Bushs disease only effects him... and any other shrubs.. Its basically a disease of shrubs.. Kerry is a weed.. Bush is suffering from RINOisimus Apeaseiotimus.
Pity.. - Dr. Pipe
Having been a government bureaucrat for over 35 years including being a senior manager, the problem isn't that political appointees are not listening to the advice of careerists, but rather, the political appointees are not following their advice. That said, many careerists look with condescension on the political appointees and try to undermine their decisions through various bureaucratic tricks including leaks, inaction, and the interjection of various legalisms and rules. Their (careerists) hubris is only surpassed by their incompetence.
The President has every reason to expect that the Executive Branch will support and implement his policy decisions. The CIA was clearly off the reservation during this past election cycle and needs to be reined in. The performance of the Agency has been found wanting for several decades. The failures of the intelligence community have been well-documented from Iran to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to North Korea to India/Pakistan to al-Qaeda. A shake-up in the careerists is long overdue. They need to be held acountable for their poor performance.
".......Porter’s Purge is coming – upwards of eighty Bush-hating left-wing Kerry stooges are going to be fired at the CIA in November. Looks like the pro-America guys are going to be running the Company once again."
As I said long ago - The "foggy-bottom " swamp is the one that needed drained first.
My post is here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1263974/posts?page=93#93
CIA IS OUT TO DESTROY OUR PRESIDENT
To The Point ^ | 10/29/2004 | Dr. Jack Wheeler
Posted on 10/31/2004 3:45:51 PM EST by coffee260
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1263974/posts
Since new CIA Director Porter Goss blocked the October Surprise agency left-wingers had prepared against Bush (discussed in “Porter At The Pass” last week - see link below), they desperately rigged another one, working with Mohammad ElBaradei at the UN.
What nobody is focusing on in Al Qaqaagate is that the CIA is behind it.
The anti-Bush lefties are now known as the “Rogue Weasels” at Langley, and they are frantic to do whatever they can to elect Kerry.
They cooked up this entire phony “tons of missing explosives” scandal, sweet-talked the head of the UN’s nuclear inspection agency, ElBaradei, to carry their water and leak it to CBS -- which drooled at the opportunity to spring the story on election eve.
They then briefed Kerry and prepared his instant assault on Bush once the surprise broke.
But some clever pro-Bush Langley folks, seeing they couldn’t spike the story at CBS, sweet-talked the New York Times into jumping the gun, spoiling the surprise and giving the Bush campaign time to tear the phony scandal apart.
Then they leaked it to Drudge, whose website promptly blew the lid off the whole scam.
The Al Qaqaa scandal (the site of the “missing” explosives in Iraq is named Al Qaqaa – isn’t that just too beautiful?) becomes Al Qaqaagate, and Kerry ends up looking like the opportunist fool he is, so clueless he doesn’t realize he’s accusing American soldiers in Iraq of “incredible incompetence” rather than Bush.
This was the last gasp of the Rogue Weasels.
Porter’s Purge is coming – upwards of eighty Bush-hating left-wing Kerry stooges are going to be fired at the CIA in November. Looks like the pro-America guys are going to be running the Company once again.
====
TTP Weekly Report - Friday, October 22, 2004
http://www.tothepointnews.com/weekly_report.php?i=&report=1098456902
PORTER AT THE PASS: HEADING OFF THE CIA’S OCTOBER SURPRISE
Behind The Lines - Dr. Jack Wheeler
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Scorpio was suspended in the clear night sky above Ghazni, Afghanistan. The air was so pure the tiny two stars of Lambda and Upsilon in Scorpio’s stinger shone brightly. The city below was quiet, the only sounds were emplacements of government soldiers calling out to each other to watch for Mujahaddin attacks. Every few seconds one of them would fire off a round or two from a Dashaka machine gun, the tracer bullets creating bright day-glo pink arcs through the dark.
Looming in front of me was the enormous rock fortress of Bala Hissar, on top of which were the barracks and headquarters of the Soviet High Command for Ghazni, lit up with huge floodlights. It was August of 1984 and I was with a group of Harakat Mujahaddin about to attack the fortress ....... http://www.tothepointnews.com/weekly_report.php?i=&report=1098456902
NOTE: Some of you may recall that in July of 2003, I posted this thread on Free Republic:
Bush vs The Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to .....
Amazon.com ^ | 7-29-03 | Laurie Mylroie - Posted on 07/29/2003 12:31:38 PM EDT by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/954564/posts
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