Our President Insists on Flying Blind

No matter how one paints the resignation (firing) of CIA Director Porter Goss, it's not a pretty picture. Here's a short paragraph from the Washington Post:

...senior administration officials said Bush had lost confidence in Goss, 67, almost from the beginning and decided months ago to replace him. In what was described as a difficult meeting in April with Negroponte, Goss was told to prepare to leave by May, according to several officials with knowledge of the conversation.

Almost from the beginning. Goss has been on the job for 19 months and almost from the beginning Bush lost confidence in him. The Decider-in-Chief seems to sit hit on his hands for long periods of time.

Perhaps the same administration officials no longer hear themselves when they spin for Bush. In many ways, the CIA is the eyes and ears of our intelligience. More money by far is spent by the Defense Dept. but that has a great deal to do with the technology involved. It's the CIA that's supposed to put it together. The State Dept. has its own intelligience analysis which might be thought of as quality assurance; the State Dept. arrives at its own analysis and it's reassuring when the State Dept. agrees with others and it requires thoughtful assessment by everybody involved when the State Dept. disagrees.

Curiously, the CIA and the State Dept. weren't not that much in disagreement before we went to war in Iraq; it was Rumfeld's honchos at the Defense Dept. that insisted on evidence that the others discounted and it was Rumsfeld's honchos who were dead wrong about WMDs and the al Qaida connection (Rumsfeld's ally in all this was Dick Cheney; not only were Rumsfeld and Cheney dead wrong, they also lied about different aspects of the intelligience and many of the lies can now be traced to the White House).

And now it appears that it is Rumsfeld who is winning the bureaucratic intelligience wars. The consequence is that the United States is growing more blind and the potential for mischief is growing greater.

Here's another article from the Washington Post by Dana Priest:

But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials.

(snip)

"Now there's a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there's a hemorrhaging of very good officers," Brennan said. "Turf battles continue" with other parts of the recently reorganized U.S. intelligence community "because there's a lack of clarity and he had no vision or strategy about the CIA's future." Brennan added: "Porter's a dedicated public servant. He was ill-suited for the job."

Whatever else one can say about the departure of Goss, and there is probably a great deal more to the story, we see once again that Bush-style cronyism has damaged our government. Rumsfeld will see whatever intelligience he wants to see. As one example, think back to Colin Powell's presentation at the UN. NSA intercepts were being used to justify war with Iraq but the intercepts were meaningless and were the dead giveaway at the time of how little the Bush Administration had in the way of evidence. Intercepts are useful only if there are experts to put those intercepts in context.

After the Cold War, the CIA was never quite brought up to speed on other nations besides Russia and China and now it appears that a system where the analysts and experts needed to make sense of all our gathered intelligience is eroding. If Bush has further military adventures in mind, such as in Iran, he will, to some extent, be flying blind in ways that matter. The many blunders and fiascos of Iraq are evidence that Bush was flying blind back in the 2002-2003 period, though in that period there was much information that Bush simply ignored. More than ever, Americans have to be wary of a president who relies on his gut.

Let me close with these three paragraphs from the Dana Priest article:

Goss, then the Republican chairman of the House intelligence panel, was handpicked by the White House to purge what some in the administration viewed as a cabal of wily spies working to oppose administration policy in Iraq. "He came in to clean up without knowing what he was going to clean up," one former intelligence official said.

Goss's counterinsurgency campaign was so crudely executed by his top lieutenants, some of them former congressional staffers, that they drove out senior and mid-level civil servants who were unwilling to accept the accusation that their actions were politically motivated, some intelligence officers and outside experts said.

"The agency was never at war with the White House," contended Gary Berntsen, a former operations officer and self-described Republican and Bush supporter who retired in June 2005. "Eighty-five percent of them are Republicans. The CIA was a convenient scapegoat."