White House And Goss Intend To Remake CIA Into PNAC True Believers

by Steve

As a follow up to my piece yesterday on Porter Goss raining destruction down upon the CIA, commenter Dry Fly points us to a piece in today’s Newsday which confirms that what Goss is doing is coming directly from the White House. Bush is ordering Goss and his henchmen to go through the Agency and get rid of disloyal “liberal” staff who don’t support the Bush agenda and who may have leaked material to the press in the past. In other words, Bush and Goss are doing exactly what both said Goss would not do during the confirmation process: turn the Agency into a political outfit supporting a political agenda instead of focusing on improving the collection of intelligence.

Commenter Avenger D-22 and others make a good point that the CIA’s recent intelligence failures make the Agency a bit overdue for the weeding out of poor analysts and superiors, and even I would admit that you don’t want an intelligence agency staffed with leakers and inept analysts. But Bush and Goss are intent it seems on diagnosing the problem to be one of insufficient loyalty to a now-faulty agenda, rather than one of building the Agency into an organization into a post-9/11, post-Cold War, tech savvy specialists who can interpret the most relevant information from human intelligence onsite.

And it is important to focus just a moment on why there were leaks, and why the Agency staff may now rue the day that they didn’t leak more in the days before the election: Bush and the White House, including Goss as chair of the House Intelligence Committee fingered the Agency for Iraq and 9/11, instead of looking into the mirror. The real problem was that the Bush White House ignored intelligence that didn’t conform to their agenda and world view, and instead made their own intelligence paramount, even when it was questioned by those experts who had reason to know better.

So now Goss and the White House are intent on institutionalizing the previous problem by purging “disloyal” analysts and superiors and replacing them with true believers of the PNAC cause, all under the smokescreen of immediately developing better human intelligence on the ground of our own and relying less on intelligence gathered from other services that have better relationships than we do. Instead of paying attention to what other intelligence services say who have networks in place already, under Goss and Bush we would develop our own sources immediately and listen to them, as if such networks can be bought and developed right away. Well, you get what you can pay for: a network of Ahmad Chalabis who share your worldview and have their own agenda, ever ready to use you for their aims. And remember, it was the other intelligence services like the Russians, the Mossad, and the Germans, who told us about the impending 9/11 attacks, and it was this White House that couldn’t be bothered.

Again, I hope the Democrats who voted for Goss are happy now.