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Hey. Bush is a pro. Just as FREEPERS sometimes lurk at 'Rat gatherings to track the bad guys and draw out 'Rat opinions, I think intel "rogues" are just lightning rods drawing attacks to safe grounds. Relax. Bush is smart. |
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.
It's amazing to me to realize just how many agencies in the US government seem to actually have interests OTHER THAN working towards the interests of the US government. First and formost would be the US State Department, and now, it seems, that portions of the CIA are also involved in undermining the President.
Mark
Whenever I see a sensible article in the New York Times, it's almost always written by their token conservative columnist, David Brooks.
bump
This is what happens when you have " Gay Day " At the CIA
The White House-C.I.A. relationship became dysfunctional, and while the blame was certainly not all on one side
Like hell it isn't.
I've got news for Brooks. The Bush administration and the DOJ are aware of the insubordination (duh) and outrageous behavior (does the Plame/Wilson plot ring any bells, in addition to the other jaw-dropping acts against this administration) and they are indeed investigating and taking steps to correct it.
I don't care for Brooks feeling the need to take this instructional tone.
The "KGB" has infiltrated the CIA, thanks to Willie and Kilory Klinton. How do we route them out? Like terrorists do they wear face masks?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's true. They are his enemies. And for the threat they pose to our security since they disregard it in order to "get Bush", they are ours, too.
The point is there are those in the CIA who will tell lies in order to try and bring down President Bush.
Why you would "side" with such is, well, disgusting.
Relax. They're one and the same.
If the "useful" agents saw, as we all can from our vantage point, the treachery of Plame and this yahoo "anonymous" Scheuer, etc, and are "feeling slighted", they by definition are not "useful".
Which is what I have been saying since that story broke. I deduced immediately---before learning of the extensiveness of this type of insubordiation and designs on bringing down President Bush--that the Plame Wilson business was set up just as you say. For example, the anonymous stories that cropped around Wilson writing his op-ed in the *NY Times*(no, you cannot expect them to correct the record). Stories that quoted anonymous "CIA officials" who supported Wilson's version, which was an obviously a false and defamotory story. There was only one reason, I stated, that the "CIA officials" would purvey a provable (provable if reporters had done their job and connected the dots and the factual state of the record as opposed to baseless claims) lie.
I have long publicly stated I hope and pray that it is Plame and her gang that are frog-marched off to jail.
Power
You're not watching very closely.
You couldn't be more wrong. The housecleaning is going on right now.
More, I fully expect some criminal prosecutions eventually.
Every one has one and its called opinion or asshole take your pick.
It's always extremely difficult to fire them, and even impossible in a lot of cases.
The best you can do most of the time is make their lives miserable at work. Give them the crap assignments, that sort of thing. Some people will take the hint after a while, but even then, some of the goldbrickers will just continue to ride it out to retirement.
A truly "good agent" would not get involved in political campaigns and try to undermine the administration. From my own experience in a government agency, I can tell you that people who want to do a good job respect the fact that administrations change. They go on with their work and try to be open to the new routines and concepts.
It's only the entrenched politicos from previous administrations who complain and try to subvert their bosses. They have forgotten their duty to the country and are simply trying to preserve their jobs.
Every administration makes changes. Unfortunately Bush left all the Clinton people in the CIA. If they're leaving because a boss is caustic, disagrees with them, or doesn't take all their advice; they need to get out of government service. Let them try to work in the private sector for a while. When they have to actually produce some results, they'll be begging for their government jobs back.
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Hey. Bush is a pro. Just as FREEPERS sometimes lurk at 'Rat gatherings to track the bad guys and draw out 'Rat opinions, I think intel "rogues" are just lightning rods drawing attacks to safe grounds. Relax. Bush is smart. |
Exactly. See #59 BTTT!
I would love to be wrong.. Would be deliliously happy to be wrong..
I'm not a divider but a uniter, is appeasement nevertheless.
Did'nt like the sound it the first time I heard it.. But gave him(Bush) the benefit of gambitology.. He(Bush) seems to prove he would NOT know a gambit if one jumped up and sucked on his earlobe.. I'll believe it when I see it.. Until then hes just Neville Chanberlain that don't have as funny of an accent as Neville did.. Bush seems to oooze "naif" out of every pore.. A good disquise maybe!, or maybe hes worse than I suspect..
The fat is in the fire now.. nevertheless. Hope I won't have to build a prosthetic leg with a shoe on it to kick my own ass for electing him..
That's what I think. There is some disinformation going on.
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