I'm not particularly impressed by that summary. The author seems to think he's discovered something important by announcing that bureaucracies like to defend their turf. Surely true, but something more is going on now.
This piece in today's Salon, by Spencer Ackerman of TNR, gives some of the background over the last year.
No one thinks the CIA's performance over the past five years has been perfect. But the belief here is that the President is using the CIA as a scapegoat for policy fuck-ups -- most obviously, blaming the agency for the WMD debacle -- and is "reforming" the CIA into an agency that will support the Administration's policies rather than being a professional and independent broker. I don't want a DCI who sees his job as supporting what the President has already decided to do. I want a DCI who tells the President what's happening in the world. With Porter Goss, it looks like we're already screwed on that score.
These paragraphs from the Salon piece give the flavor of what's happening at ground level:
- Illustrating this fear is the cautionary tale of the CIA's 2002 examination of the dubious connection between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. As a result of intense pressure from senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Cheney -- many of whom had already concluded that a solid connection existed -- CIA analysts prepared a report titled "Iraq and al-Qaida: Assessing a Murky Relationship." Or at least a few of them did. Circulated that June, as the administration sought rationales for an invasion of Iraq, the report excluded the assessments of the agency's Near East and South Asia (NESA) office, which generally cast doubt on either an existing or a prospective alliance between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. The paper was chiefly the product of the CIA's terrorism analysts, who explained that their approach was "purposefully aggressive in seeking to draw connections, on the assumption that any indication of a relationship between these two elements could carry great dangers." Jami Miscik, the CIA's deputy director for intelligence, told Senate Intelligence Committee investigators that the paper was intended to "stretch to the maximum the evidence you had." The exclusion of NESA prompted an inquiry by the agency's ombudsman into politicization.
Despite CIA professionals' general skepticism about the White House's desired conclusions and attempt to stay within the confines of responsible intelligence work, a slanted study still emerged. Yet the facts did constrain the analysis, and the report stated that there existed "no conclusive evidence of cooperation on specific terrorist operations." In frustration, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst detailed to the office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, who sponsored much of the effort to manipulate intelligence to connect al-Qaida to Saddam, contended to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his chief deputies that the "CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored." (In its public pronouncements about the alleged ties, the Bush administration generally followed the DIA analyst's advice.)
Now, with Goss at the helm and the independence of the agency under siege, many at Langley fear that the Bush administration won't have to worry anymore about being told anything it doesn't already believe.
Club's blogger suggests that the agency is just trying to defend its turf. Maybe so, but can't we all agree that the CIA should be free to call it like it sees it?
