A commission appointed by pResident * to look into the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war will "recommend a series of changes intended to encourage more dissent within the nation's spy agencies and better organize the government's multi-tentacled fight against terrorism, officials said yesterday." -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11145-2005Mar29.htmlThat recommendation will conflict with current policy at the CIA, where Porter Goss, President Bush's new director of central intelligence, "has told his staff that their job is to 'support the administration and its policies' and cautioned them not to 'identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration.'" -
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/11/19/the_purge_at_cia/The commission's report will "propose more competitive analysis,… improved tradecraft training, more 'devil's advocacy' in the formation of national intelligence estimates and the appointment of an intelligence ombudsman to hear from analysts who believe their work has been compromised." In the run-up to the war, the Bush administration "created stovepipes" to funnel information that confirmed its suspicions, frequently freezing out or discouraging dissent.
Today's WP article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11145-2005Mar29.htmlDissent on Intelligence Is Critical, Report Says
Commission's Ideas Diverge From Planned Centralization
By Walter Pincus and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, March 30, 2005; Page A01
A presidential commission assigned to look into the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war will recommend a series of changes intended to encourage more dissent within the nation's spy agencies and better organize the government's multi-tentacled fight against terrorism, officials said yesterday. In a report to be made public tomorrow, the officials said, the panel will propose more competitive analysis and information-sharing by intelligence agencies, improved tradecraft training, more "devil's advocacy" in the formation of national intelligence estimates and the appointment of an intelligence ombudsman to hear from analysts who believe their work has been compromised.
The report will also suggest the creation of a new national nonproliferation center to coordinate the fight against weapons of mass destruction, according to officials who have read the 700-page classified version of the report and declined to be identified because it has not been released. But unlike the trend toward greater centralization enshrined in a new intelligence law signed by President Bush, the report envisions the center as a facilitating body and urges the government to keep its specialists dispersed in various intelligence agencies. The net result, according to officials, would be to move away from the intelligence community's tradition of searching for consensus, in favor of opening up internal debate and including a more diverse spectrum of views. The goal is to provide policymakers a fuller understanding of the state of the government's knowledge.
Bush appointed the panel, officially known as the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, in February 2004 after initially resisting any further examination of the assessments that preceded his decision to invade Iraq. Like other studies, the commission report offers a scathing review of the CIA for concluding that Saddam Hussein had secret weapons that ultimately were never found, while also taking aim at the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other agencies, according to officials. In addition, it examines the performance of intelligence agencies in Iran, North Korea, Libya and Pakistan, but the Iran and North Korea sections remain classified.
The White House, while refusing to disclose the contents of the report, embraced it as the authoritative account of what went wrong in Iraq. Bush was briefed on the report yesterday by aides who have reviewed it. The president will meet with the panel's co-chairmen, Senior U.S. Appeals Court Judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), at the White House tomorrow and then join the two at a briefing for reporters. White House press secretary Scott McClellan praised the report as "a very thorough job" and suggested that Bush would adopt many, though not necessarily all, of its ideas. "We will carefully consider the recommendations and act quickly on the recommendations, as well," he told reporters at his daily briefing. "They build upon the steps we've already taken to improve our intelligence-sharing and -gathering."
more.....
The archived BG article:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/11/19/the_purge_at_cia/The purge at CIA
By H.D.S. Greenway | November 19, 2004
PORTER GOSS, President Bush's new director of central intelligence, has told his staff that their job is to "support the administration and its policies" and cautioned them not to "identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration." OK, the Central Intelligence Agency is part of the executive branch of government, and it goes without saying that it should support its foreign policy goals. But wait a minute. CIA, of all the branches of executive power, is not paid simply to charge ahead blindly in the direction the administration points like the Light Brigade at Balaclava: "Theirs not to make reply/ Theirs not to reason why/ Theirs but to do and die." The CIA's job is to use its head and advise, not just blind obedience.
The CIA has been hemorrhaging top-level personnel. Some of the best-trained and senior officers are being forced out. For weeks the administration has been whispering to any journalist within earshot how CIA has not been sufficiently on the president's team, abetted by Senator John McCain's calling CIA a "rogue agency" that leaked information detrimental to Bush's reelection -- "dysfunctional and unaccountable" -- and refusing to change. There certainly were intelligence failures in the lead-up to 9/11 and the Iraq war. And you can say at any given time and in any given year that someone needs to clean up the mess at CIA. It's like the mess in Washington. There always is one. Goss did go on to say in his memo to the staff that CIA should "provide intelligence as we see it -- and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker." And, on the whole, a good shake-up of any organization helps from time to time.
But that being said, Goss's admonition that CIA's primary duty is to support the administration's policies rather negates and contradicts the notion that CIA should call it as it sees it. There were simply too many drop-in visits by Vice President Cheney to CIA headquarters, just to make sure CIA wasn't missing any Saddam Hussein-Al Qaeda connections prior to the Iraq war, to feel sanguine about that. Nine times out of 10 an intelligence failure is really a policy failure. It is clear now that the administration planned to invade Iraq before 9/11 and took advantage of a national tragedy to push its agenda. It is also clear that intelligence officers saw that their career paths lay in the direction of proving a driven administration right, not wrong, about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Many did try to point out that the evidence simply wasn't there, but they were overruled at the top.
Many of the recent CIA resignations came from clashes between senior CIA officials and the relatively young and inexperienced but ideologically motivated staff that Goss brought with him from Congress. This is reminiscent of the young and ignorant ideologues who were sent to Iraq, not because they knew anything about Iraq but because the were ideologically pure in the pursuit of administration policies. There is also the haunting echo of outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft complaining that "intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations" were "putting at risk the very security of our nation in time of war." In other words, judges shouldn't question the president's policies either.
more....
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
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