7thriv

Lots of commentary about Porter Goss's WaPo op-ed about the interrogation circus. Most commentors seem to want to focus on his oblique suggestion that Nancy Pelosi was well aware of the "enhanced interrogation" tactics that she is now decrying. I was more struck by this passage and wish our national conversation would shift towards this direction:Porter Goss: Security Before Politics

Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can't have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets. Americans have to decide now.

That's exactly right. And right now, I would choose dismantling the CIA and then redistributing its parts and its few competent agents among the various branches of the DNI and Department of Defense. A stand-alone civilian intelligence service is simply incapable of conducting its business in a democracy, especially a democracy such as this where there are so many in the political and intellectual elite who clearly view civilian intelligence activities with hosility.

It's not that we can't have intelligence services; of course, we can. The Pentagon and NSA are more than capable of gathering useful intelligence, and then shutting the f*** up about it. I am sure there are all sorts of reasons why this might be, but surely military discipline plays a large part of this. The civilians at the CIA, on the other hand, are a national embarassment, seemingly incapable of keeping the most crucial secrets (remember that it was CIA leakers who originally told the world about rendition, enhanced interrogations, black sites, and the like). Not only that, there is a legal double-standard that virtually encourages CIA leaking. If you disclose Pentagon secrets, you run the very real risk of going to jail like Larry Franklin. But if you leak CIA secrets? Hell, you're a brave Warrior of Democracy exercising your First Amendment rights! Nice work, if you can get it.

Moreover, many of the CIA employees who have gained prominence in the post-9/11 era are a motley crew. Think of Larry Johnson, Bob Baer, Valerie Plame, or Michael Scheur. These are people who failed spectacularly at their jobs - finding Bin Laden, learning the extent of Iraqi WMD's, seeking out al-Quaeda plots - and yet they have been hailed for their blistering attacks on George Bush. Was he supposed to know something they didn't know? How about Ramsey Clark acolyte Ray McGovern, as wild eyed a leftist "American Empire" conspiracy theorist as you could find? This was the man who used to give the daily presidential briefing to Bush 41. Out of thousands of CIA employees, this freak was the one who talked to the president?

And things aren't getting better. As of 2007, the CIA has taken the position (again leaked to the press) that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. Really? Iran seems to think it's developing nukes. Imagine the leak-fest when Iran detonates a bomb and turns the balance of power in the Middle East upside down! Are we still going to be blaming George Bush then? That must be the plan. Why else would they be so confident?

I have this crazy fantasy that the CIA is an elaborate disinsformation operation, where we pretend to have a dysfunctional intelligence service that does nothing but leak fantasy facts to a credulous press, while the "real" CIA goes about its sinister business. Maybe Khalid Sheik Mohammed is actually a CIA "asset" whom we are making bulletproof through pretend stories about torture, when he's really living openly in Venice Beach (having shed his fat-suit) and chuckling over the irony of it all. But that is a fantasy. Harsh reality is that we have the worst of all worlds: (1) a hapless civilian intelligence agency incapable of keeping its secrets, (2) a helpless crew of security hawks who are so politically inept that they can't seem to win an argument against hysterics, (3) and a hopeless political left that believes that the North Pole is melting, but that America's enemies are little more than the literary creations of shadowy "neo-cons." We can only hope that someone, somewhere, is doing their job, even as the world grows increasingly mad.