- Driving past the George Bush Center for Intelligence,
as the CIA headquarters is officially known, you can't help wondering how
on earth America's spy service has become the favorite whipping boy of
the right wing.
-
- It's crazy for a nation at war to be purging its spies.
But that's what has been happening in the weeks since former representative
Porter Goss (R-Fla.) and a phalanx of conservative congressional aides
took over at the CIA. What makes the putsch genuinely scary is that it
seems to be driven by an animus toward the CIA that could do real damage
to the nation's security.
-
- Goss's supporters argue that he's just trying to rebuild
an agency that needs a shakeup. And certainly the CIA could improve its
performance: It is too risk-averse, too prone to groupthink, too mired
in mediocrity. But the cure for these problems is hardly to send in a team
of ideologues from Capitol Hill and drive out the agency's most experienced
intelligence officers. This politicization can only make the agency's
underlying
problems even worse. And heaven knows what foreign intelligence services,
which are America's crucial partners in the war on terrorism, make of the
spectacle at Langley.
-
- But I doubt that performance issues are what's really
motivating this housecleaning. The CIA, after all, did a better job of
recognizing the al Qaeda threat before Sept. 11, 2001, than did the FBI,
the Pentagon or the National Security Council. And while the CIA could
certainly improve its operations in Iraq, the agency at least understood
that the United States would face a bloody postwar insurgency there. If
performance were the yardstick, surely it would be the official who bungled
postwar planning for Iraq, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, who
would be out on his ear.
-
- The conservative CIA-bashers also complain about leaks
and criticism of the administration by agency personnel. Their prime
example
is Michael Scheuer, former head of the Osama bin Laden unit and author,
under the pen name "Anonymous," of two books critical of U.S.
anti-terrorism strategy. Right-wingers speak of Scheuer as if he were some
kind of closet Kerry follower, but clearly they haven't read his
bloodcurdling
books. "Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim
foes," he writes in "Imperial Hubris." "With killing
must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure." Not the usual
liberal bromides, to say the least.
-
- No, what's driving the Langley Lobotomy is a belief among
conservatives that the CIA is an impediment to Bush administration foreign
policy. Civilian officials at the Pentagon and neoconservatives at
Washington
think tanks have been badmouthing the agency relentlessly for the past
four years. Their arguments are sometimes driven by special pleading -
complaints that the CIA opposed the neoconservatives' favorite Iraqi, Ahmed
Chalabi, for example; or that it was too close to Sunni Arab countries
such as Jordan, Egypt and Morocco; or that it was too skeptical of the
administration's optimism about transforming Iraq and the Arab
world.
-
- Sometimes, as in the case of the military, the issue
has been turf; more power for the agency meant less for the generals and
admirals who run the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance
Office and other intelligence- collection units. That turf consciousness,
combined with the Pentagon's ferocious lobbying power, seems to have
crippled
or killed outright the Sept. 11 commission's proposals for intelligence
reform.
-
- If the military were facing a similar political purge,
the public would rightly be indignant. But for some reason, the protected
status accorded the military in recent years does not extend to their
brethren
at the CIA. Intelligence officers have been fair game for political attack
for decades. The CIA-bashers were once on the left. Now it's the right
that demonizes the CIA as an elitist "rogue agency," but the
effect is the same. The agency wears a permanent "Kick Me" sign
on its backside. It's the excuse for everyone's problems. Even Sen. John
McCain, who should know better, has joined in the public flaying of the
CIA, calling it "dysfunctional." Doesn't he see that the current
assault on career intelligence officers is like the post- Vietnam attacks
on an unpopular U.S. military?
-
- What's disturbing is that all this is happening under
the eye of a reelected President Bush. Does the man who campaigned as a
resolute wartime leader really think it makes sense for conservative
Republicans
to gut the CIA and derail the intelligence reform bill? Why does he find
it so hard to speak up for the politically battered officers who staff
the George Bush Center for Intelligence? If there's a logic here, other
than misguided partisan politics, it escapes me.
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- End of PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
- Copyright 2004 by PENN LLC. All rights reserved.
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