Posted on 12/24/2007 4:56:31 AM PST by shrinkermd
Outrage over the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes is but one element of the distress Republican intelligence watchdogs in Congress feel about the agency. "It is acting as though it is autonomous, not accountable to anyone," Rep. Peter Hoekstra, ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee, told me. That is his mildest language about the CIA. In carefully selected adjectives, Hoekstra calls it "incompetent, arrogant and political."
Chairman Silvestre Reyes and other Democrats on the intelligence committee join Hoekstra in demanding investigation into the tape destruction in the face of the administration's resistance, but the Republicans stand alone in protesting the CIA's defiant undermining of President Bush. In its clean bill of health for Iran on nuclear weapons development, the agency acted as an independent policymaker rather than an adviser. It has withheld from nearly all members of Congress information on the Israeli bombing of Syria in September. The U.S. intelligence community is deciding on its own what information the public shall learn.
Intelligence agencies, from Nazi Germany to present-day Pakistan, for better or for ill, have tended to break away from their governments...
The CIA's contempt for the president was demonstrated during his 2004 reelection campaign when a senior intelligence officer, Paul R. Pillar, made off-the-record speeches around the country criticizing the invasion of Iraq. On Sept. 24, 2004, three days before my column exposed Pillar's activity, former representative Porter Goss arrived at Langley as Bush's handpicked director of central intelligence. Goss had resigned from Congress to accept Bush's mandate to clean up the CIA. But the president eventually buckled under fire from the old boys at Langley and their Democratic supporters in Congress, and Goss was sacked in May 2006.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
An extremely dangerous situation... Democrats won’t take it serious until it is their ox who is gored.
The CIA is a Democrat support group. If a Dem is elected the CIA will produce whatever intelligence the Dem pres. demands.
Even FOX news plays along with the MSMs agenda most of the time by following their manufactured “news” and polls without ever revealing or even examining the corrupt process by which so much of what we hear is scripted, manufactured and packaged by the MSM, with the ultimate aim of promoting a political agenda.
I know most of you are very aware of the process, but it is well worth noting each time it happens.
Bush made one of the biggest mistakes when he didn’t fire the head of the CIA and FBI and many others on 12 Sept.
They and their agencies failed the country. Then the 911 Commision failed the country and now the CIA has failed again in a treasonous way.
We should ask each Republican candidate. Will you fire the head of the CIA, FBI and DHS on the day one?
Then start firing or transfering a lot of holdovers..if you can’t fire the civil servants..transfer them to an empty room in Adak AK to listen to old short wave radios.
The NIE report in which the press has almost unanimously taken at face value the statement “Iran halted its bomb development program” was at best deceptive.
There are three legs to nuclear weapon development. One would be a delivery system, ie missles to carry the bomb. For theater delivery, Iran already has such vehicles, and is working apace to extend that range.
By far, the most difficult and expensive part is enriching bomb grade uranium (or plutonium, but they don’t appear to be doing that at least). Enrichment continues unabated. With the equipment for that, it is only a matter of time and scale to move from reactor suitable fuel to bomb grade.
If fuel and delivery vehicle is available, the least difficult leg is fashioning the weapon itself, the one leg the NIE claims Iran abandoned. Even if true, this so easily overcome as to be nearly irrelevant. People from our own nuclear program have suggested that a bright grad student with a generous budget could, if provided the fuel itself, fashion a working device in a terrifyingly short time.
The NIE report in which the press has almost unanimously taken at face value the statement “Iran halted its bomb development program” was at best deceptive.
There are three legs to nuclear weapon development. One would be a delivery system, ie missles to carry the bomb. For theater delivery, Iran already has such vehicles, and is working apace to extend that range.
By far, the most difficult and expensive part is enriching bomb grade uranium (or plutonium, but they don’t appear to be doing that at least). Enrichment continues unabated. With the equipment for that, it is only a matter of time and scale to move from reactor suitable fuel to bomb grade.
If fuel and delivery vehicle is available, the least difficult leg is fashioning the weapon itself, the one leg the NIE claims Iran abandoned. Even if true, this so easily overcome as to be nearly irrelevant. People from our own nuclear program have suggested that a bright grad student with a generous budget could, if provided the fuel itself, fashion a working device in a terrifyingly short time.
Wasn’t it a CIA employee and Kerry supporter who leaked the phone tapping story to the NY Times? Nah, they’re not hurting America.../sarc
The main benefit to this kind of arrangement is that the CIA would not be making policy anymore. The CIA would not run operations or produce position papers. The people that came from the CIA might do those things for one of the joint commands. No more CIA directors deciding which Administration policies they'll accept and which they'll oppose. I doubt they'll get many takers for their analysis offerings either. The friggin' weather forecasters and stockbrokers have much better track records.
Some good ideas...
Done already... remember a story a year or so ago where a "bright grad student" looked at available info on the internet and made plans for what experts considered a "working" bomb.
So?
Use all this leftoid rhetoric as a great excuse to CLEAN HOUSE.
Use a meataxe if necessary—take the headcount down to 10% if necessary, and start over.
Shoulda been done six years ago after 9/11, but what the hey, better late than never.
A politicized “intelligence” agency is worthless. They will never tell you the truth and withhold critical information to make the boss look bad.
If you remember the previous administration, the boss didn’t bother to check with the CIA very often. Everyone was happy.
Good idea.
How did this happen? Unionized civil servants perhaps?
The CIA leadership (e.g., Helms) despised Nixon, and in turn Nixon despised an organization he felt was dominated by liberal Ivy Leaguers. The same holds true of most of William Casey’s Ivy League underlings who hated Reagan’s friend. They did, however, get along just fine with Bill Clinton who demanded very little from them. The CIA has been living off its few successes for decades, but now it has a movie (the propaganda puff-piece Charlie Wilson’s War) depicting its ponderous effort in Afghanistan.
The NIE format, a mishmash of comments coalesced from a number of agency judgements (and in the old days sprinkled with contradictory footnotes), has too often served as a document of questionable merit for policy makers. I am reminded that the CIA was oblivious to the Egytian move of two Army battle groups to the Suez Canal in preparation for their attack on Israel (the Yom Kippur War). Then there was the ambivalent CIA report that sort-of predicted an Iraqi attack on Iran in Summer 1980. The CIA also missed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the same year. Then in 1993 it broke the UN embargo on shipping arms to the Balkans and sent illegal arms to the Islamists in early 1993 thereby ensuring that a Muslim Bosnia would survive. The Agency had nothing on Bin Laden seven years after Al Qaeda was created in Afghanistan in 1988. Enough! I’m making myself sick.
Indeed dangerous. But Bush has brought a lot on to himself. He didnt clean up the Clinton mess and instead just looked the other way. Should we get a R prez he will have to clean up the Bush/Clinton mess.
But how much power does a president really have to "clean up" an organization where people hide behind the civil service and their union? The original point of the civil service was to put these people beyond partisan politics. Yet here we have a situation where a commander-in-chief has no authority over a large part of the forces that are needed to protect the country.
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