Monday, September 27, 2004
DCI Goss needs to go in and kick a little butt, because it looks like the ideologues in his newly assigned agency are getting way out of control. There have been frequent stories of an anti-Bush culture in the CIA, and this Novak column points up the latest egregious example.
CNN.com - CIA versus Bush - Sep 27, 2004
This exchange leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other.
Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, sat down Tuesday night in a large West Coast city with a select group of private citizens. He was not talking off the cuff.
Relying on a multi-paged, single-spaced memorandum, Pillar said he and his colleagues concluded early in the Bush administration that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout Islam.
This was not from a CIA retiree but an active senior official. (Pillar, no covert operative, is listed openly in the Federal Staff Directory.)
For President Bush to publicly write off a CIA paper as just guessing is without precedent. For the agency to go semi-public is not only unprecedented but shocking...
Indeed it is. It is the President's job to take the information and analysis provided to him and decide what to do about it. The idea that an invasion of Iraq could exacerbate negative feelings toward the US in the short run is a "no duh" moment, but what it does in the long run is another question, and one for the President to answer. It's his job to cut through the "analysis paralysis" in agencies like CIA and State and decide when a plan that takes into account the balance of risks calls for action.
It is NOT the job of CIA employees to come out publicly and defend their paralysis, particularly when it has the effect of opposing the Chief Executive. Want to get the word out? Go into retirement and write a book like the rest of the Arabist State employees or join the gaggle of geriatric Gulf State Ambassadors on the lecture circuit. Do something like this in the private sector and you wouldn't see your desk again - the contents having been neatly packed on your behalf and left at the building entrance along with your severance check and unopened Secret Santa present.
Update: Power Line comments.
Update2: Dan Darling has an able and informative fisking (This is right up his alley).
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Porter Goss, Call Your Office.
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