Tuesday, 16 November, 2004

Bad Ideas Part of me thinks that this housecleaning of the CIA CIA Chief Seeks to Reassure Employees E-Mail Sent After 2 Officials Resign (WashingtonPost.com) , Behind CIA's personnel changes | csmonitor.com is long overdue. I tend toward sympathy the camp that feels that 11 September and the problem of terrorist networks like Al qaeda are not that off the wall that  the agency didn't drop at least a little ball. But this has all the markings of a purge and purges are rarely good. at least three things stand out. First this is doing nothing to de politicize national intelligence which is among the stated goals of the Senate committee report and the 9-11 commision report. Second if you read the articles and some of the editorials and op-eds that have sprouted up around them - you see hints that it's the wrong people who are leaving, and the wrong people who are staying. Third some apparently felt concerning the e-mail that Porter Goss sent out yesterday that there were hints of a loyalty oath Cooking With Goss (slate) and New C.I.A. Chief Tells Workers to Back Administration Policies (NYT) to the administration in what the new director expected out of the agency. This is most explicitly the wrong direction for this nations intelligence gather to expect it to come in behind policy playing clean up. No position could obtain worse results than this will. 11:33:31 PM    comment [];trackback [];

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2004 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 12/01/04; 12:14:01.