Death Of The CIA?
Porter Goss resigned from the CIA last week, and Bush has already trotted out the potential replacement: an Air Force general, active duty. Predictably, some people are upset.
This is really interesting from where I’m sitting. I’m just some guy with a blog, so what follows here is purely speculation.
Some people might be surprised to learn that the CIA, like a lot of DC institutions, is rife with career drones – bureaucrats and analysts who bring their own political views to work each day. Nothing wrong with that, we all do it.
But in Washington, political views are more potent when you are in a position to directly influence national policy.
This is a real problem at the Department of State, and has been for many years. Is it no surprise that the CIA might have similar problems? Witness the run-up to Iraq, where the CIA continuously leaked speculative reports that undermined the debate to go to war – speculative reports that later turned out to be untrue, but still bouncing around as a meme in the media. Or the McCarthy firing. Or a number of leaks that expose secret arrangements with foreign governments to detain and question terror suspects outside of the US. Or the sorry Joe Wilson mess (where everything he has claimed turned out to be untrue compared to his original report on Niger).
The political aspects of these issues are open for debate, but the CIA has no place in stepping outside of the chain of command and spinning hard data.
Porter Goss was brought in to clean up the CIA. He was an ex-agent, a man who cared deeply about the organization. Perhaps he wasn’t supportive of the coming changes in the CIA?
The various intelligence services of the United States MUST be aligned behind the policies set forth by the civilian command authority, which is the President with Congressional oversight. They must execute these policies regardless of their personal political views.
What government organization does this quite effectively?
They occupy a five sided building in Arlington.
Speculation is that Bush is pressing for the CIA to be reduced and some of those functions turned over to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the Pentagon. Goss resisted this. So he had to go.
So Bush brings in a military man to run the CIA. I would guess this is a helpful way of facilitating this transfer of authority.
Is this a good thing? I can understand the objections, but I think they might be overblown. The military already wields a lot of power effectively and without threatening the fabric of the Republic. And the CIA is already restricted to operations outside of the United States, so there should be little domestic concern as the DIA takes over a lot of these duties.
If this sort of reorganization happens, I think it is an appropriate recalibration of resources, given the fact that the Terror War must move from a law enforcement paradigm to that of an active, aggressive war. Putting these functions in the DIA puts the data one step closer to those that execute (literally) the actions that might flow from intelligence data.
And it would be a major step in reducing the political in-fighting that goes on in these agencies.
Watch the confirmation hearings of the new CIA director. It should reveal a lot.
Filed under: Politics
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