Posted on 08/24/2006 6:21:01 AM PDT by Quilla
If anyone ever thought the war between the White House and the CIA boiled down to some kind of senseless, meaningless bureaucratic squabble with no real consequences for the future of our security, think again.
The partisanship, the ideological conflicts, the personality clashes, the arrogance, and the turf wars that have marked the last 5 years of bureaucratic wrangling between the two sides has now poisoned the relationship between the White House and our intelligence agencies to the point that neither trusts the other. What this means is really quite simple.
As we try and figure out the best way to confront Iran, our government is hopelessly divided.
While policy makers and intelligence analysts square off over threat assessments regarding Iran and the mullah’s intentions, the distrust exhibited by both sides has spilled over into the public arena and threatens to paralyze our ability to respond to the regional challenge of Iran and the global challenges inherent in their support for terrorism. The New York Times reports:
Some senior Bush administration officials and top Republican lawmakers are voicing anger that American spy agencies have not issued more ominous warnings about the threats that they say Iran presents to the United States.
The complaints, expressed privately in recent weeks, surfaced in a Congressional report about Iran released Wednesday. They echo the tensions that divided the administration and the Central Intelligence Agency during the prelude to the war in Iraq.
The criticisms reflect the views of some officials inside the White House and the Pentagon who advocated going to war with Iraq and now are pressing for confronting Iran directly over its nuclear program and ties to terrorism, say officials with knowledge of the debate.
There is plenty of fault to go around for this state of affairs. Some blame must be ascribed to the institutional myopia of our intelligence agencies, a characteristic that punishes “thinking outside the box” and rocking the boat. With so much emphasis placed on consensus-building, it is tempting to dismiss intelligence that doesn’t fit the mold created by the necessity of having to satisfy so many interests – State, Defense, and the White House. This leads to maddening generalities and overly cautious assessments that to many in the Administration is simply unacceptable:
The new report, from the House Intelligence Committee, led by Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, portrayed Iran as a growing threat and criticized American spy agencies for cautious assessments about Iran’s weapons programs. “Intelligence community managers and analysts must provide their best analytical judgments about Iranian W.M.D. programs and not shy away from provocative conclusions or bury disagreements in consensus assessments,” the report said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction like nuclear arms.
Some policy makers also said they were displeased that American spy agencies were playing down intelligence reports — including some from the Israeli government — of extensive contacts recently between Hezbollah and members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. “The people in the community are unwilling to make judgment calls and don’t know how to link anything together,” one senior United States official said.
Part of the problem is certainly the Bush Administration’s belief in vending machine intelligence analysis; put a request for information into the slot and out come the answers. That may be a gross oversimplification but it is clear that there are some in the White House who believe that the CIA should be doing a much better job. In a sense, one can sympathize with the quandary our policy makers are facing. The stakes are so high that making policy decisions based on what they feel is inadequate intelligence is simply unacceptable.
In the case of Iran, they may not have much of a choice:
Several intelligence officials said that American spy agencies had made assessments in recent weeks that despite established ties between Iran and Hezbollah and a well-documented history of Iran arming the organization, there was no credible evidence to suggest either that Iran ordered the Hezbollah raid that touched off the recent fighting or that Iran was directly controlling attacks against Israel.
“There are no provable signs of Iranian direction on the ground,” said one intelligence official in Washington. “Nobody should think that Hezbollah is a remote-controlled entity.” American military assessments have broadly echoed this view, say people who maintain close ties to military intelligence officers.
“Does Iran profit from all of this? Yes,” said Gen. Wayne A. Downing Jr., the retired former commander of the Special Operations Command and a White House counterterrorism adviser during President Bush’s first term. “But is Iran pulling the strings? The guys I’m talking to say, ‘no.’ ”
It is difficult to gauge how much of an independent operator Nasrallah actually is. The Hezb’allah leader definitely has his own agenda, both as it relates to Lebanese domestic politics and Hezb’allah’s future as a political and military force in the region. It is not surprising that our intelligence agencies cannot find a smoking gun regarding Iran’s involvement in Nasrallah’s decision that precipitated the war, to attack the Israeli patrol on July 12th.
That’s because it is open to question whether Nasrallah himself knew about any such attack in advance. At the very least, he may have authorized an attack if any of the several Hezb’allah outposts on the border saw an opportunity to take Israeli prisoners. But it may be a bit of a stretch to say that he ordered the specific attack.
This uncertainty about Hezb’allah and its relationship to Iran is one thing. Trying to divine Iranian intentions as well as estimate the progress of their nuclear program is quite another. Last summer’s leak of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran discussed the probability that Iran was perhaps a decade away from being able to construct a nuclear device. There was also criticism of the NIE’s inability to say with any certainty that Iran was in fact seeking nuclear weapons in the first place. To many in the White House, the NIE appeared to be more bureaucratic CYA rather than any attempt to honestly give policy makers the information they felt they needed to counter the perceived threat from Iran.
While the Israelis believe the mullahs are now less than 3 years away from having the ability to construct a nuclear weapon, many arms control experts in this country point to the daunting technical challenges that Iran has yet to prove it can overcome in order to build a bomb anytime soon.
Who’s right and who’s wrong? Do we follow Dick Cheney’s “One Percent” scenario, where if there is a 1% chance of a terrible threat we take action? Or do we take a more cautious approach and work to prevent the mullahs from making a bomb by building up international pressure through sanctions and consensus? Do we go for regime change? Do we try and talk directly to the Iranians?
The answers to these questions require cooperation and trust between those who have been elected by the people and charged with the awesome responsibility of protecting us from threats like Iran and those whose job it is to analyze and report on those threats to policymakers.
But the dysfunctional nature of the relationship between the White House and our intelligence agencies has eroded that trust over the last 5 years until it appears that cooperation is almost an impossibility. Certainly 9/11 had much to do with the initial problems between the two sides. It was only made worse by the errors made by both sides in the lead up to the liberation of Iraq. And the clear partisanship exhibited by some in the intelligence community whose leaks during the 2004 campaign, designed to bring down the Bush Administration, led eventually to the White House pushing back in the Plame Affair probably destroyed the relationship between policymakers and advisors beyond repair.
To say that this state of affairs is unacceptable is a given. One almost wants to knock the principals’ heads together and tell them to get over their differences and cooperate, so serious are the issues raised by Iranian meddling and the threat of Iranian nukes. But the paralysis that is apparently preventing our intelligence agencies (burned on 9/11, burned on Iraq WMD) and policy makers from working together to protect us needs to be addressed somehow.
Whether anything can be salvaged from this relationship before January 20, 2009 could spell the difference between living in a safer world or a more dangerous world for many years to come.
Rick Moran is the proprietor of Rightwing Nuthouse and the host of “The Rick Moran Show” on Wide Awakes Radio.
FIRE THEM ALL!!!!!!!!!!THE SHORT, THE TALL, THE BIG AND THE SMALL.......FIRE THEM ALL!!!!!!!!
I said it at the time. Bush and his agenda will be competely undermined because he refused to celan out all the clinton appointees (who in turn celaned out the agencies even deeper and hired/promoted leftist idealogues).
Bush was either unbelivably incompetent or agreed with Clinton and his appointees.
The latter is the truth.
Great Britain did not give advance warning about the plan to blow up airlines using liquid explosives because the CIA would leak the information. Pretty damning info.
CIA has never been accurate on the ability of our enemies to develop nuclear weapons, think USSR, China, Pakistan, India, N.Korea, IRAN...it is almost like they refuse to do any intelligence except to make sure to cover their fat bureaucrats' A$$'s...they are definitely an expensive bunch of powdered clowns!
We do need to dump these fools and get our intelligence problems fixed ASAP!
Exactly right - Fire them all!
Why is this even an issue now? They had 5 years to clean house. 911 and Iraq gave the WH the political cover to through them all under the bus en mas.
Why does the WH keep trying to make friends with people out to destroy them? When will they wake up and realize no matter what they do they will never win over their critics. Better to remove them and move on.
This would break the CIA management from being wedded to points of view. It seems they're skewing collection and analysis to support their positions rather than vice-versa.
Quoting Donald Rumsfeld... “My goodness...”
Last night... we were treated to video of Hezbollah bunkers adorned with photo's and literature from Iran on all of the MSM networks. The missile the damaged the Israeli warship off Lebanon was assuredly directed... if not fired by Iranian, military advisor's. For the CIA to assume that Iran is not the straw that stirs the drink in Lebanon... is not only flippantly moronic... it's deadly.
IMO the only way to solve the tensions
between the two parties is to have both
agree to a clean sweep of all politically
appointed jobs in the government. When
Bush first came in, he bent over backwards
to extend the hand of cooperation and geniality
between the Reps. and Dems. He did it so often
that his own base became embarrassed for him.
But the Senate honchos Ted Kennedy and
Tom Daschle would have none of that; and rebuffed
all attempts to conciliation. Then, when Bush
won again in 2004, the venom really sank deep
into their veins; since then, even the good
of the nation no longer takes precedence in Lib.
voting and their anti-America voices when out of
the country. We're fast getting to the place
where our terrorist enemies will win and this
nation will fall because we have truly become Lincoln's "House Divided."
ping
Close the CIA. First everyone gets a lie detector to find out what they leaked. Seal the leaks.
Combine the NSA and DIA into a new agency.
Let's just get rid of the CIA. They're totally worthless. We have other intelligence agencies who seem to be capable of doing the job, so why do we have all these creepy people getting fat on the taxpayer's dollar while they do nothing. They can't even seem to make a decision.
Get rid of CIA. All they do is leak. Look at this report in Al Jazeera quoting BBC who received leaks from Congress of a "secret" report on the state of our knowledge of what Iran is doing. Outrageous.
http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=12286
President Bush sent Porter Goss to clean out the viper's nests at the CIA. The CIA won, Porter Goss was defeated.
President Bush sent Condoleezza Rice to clean out the viper's nests at the State Department. The State Department won, Condoleezza Rice was defeated.
The "A" team wasn't up to the task, so who is next?
Sending 1 guy at the top is totally inadequate and utterly foolish.
Clinton celaned out the ranks. he replaced HUNDREDS of folks at those agencies. It was absolutely a purge that the press overlooked (they were so excited by it all).
Bush is afraid the press will use terms like "purge" if he does the same thing. Bush is a coward, and a socialist.
It has become a club.
Bush's biggest mistake to date has been not handing George Tenet his hat on 1/21/01. "Slam dunk" my foot.
" Before World War II, the US Government traditionally left intelligence to the principal executors of American foreign policy, the Department of State and the armed services.
Attachés and diplomats collected the bulk of America’s foreign intelligence, mostly in the course of official business but occasionally in clandestine meetings with secret contacts. In Washington, desk officers scrutinized their reports in the regional bureaus and the military intelligence services (the Office of Naval Intelligence [ONI] and the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division, better known as the G-2).
Important and timely information went up the chain of command, perhaps even to the President, and might be shared across departmental lines, but no one short of the White House tried to collate and assess all the vital information acquired by the US government. State and the military developed their own security and counterintelligence procedures, and the Army and Navy created separate offices to decipher and read foreign communications.
Senior diplomat Robert Murphy later reflected “it must be confessed that our Intelligence organization in 1940 was primitive and inadequate. It was timid, parochial, and operating strictly in the tradition of the Spanish-American War.”
"Then FDR on 11 July 1941 appointed William J. Donovan of New York to sort the mess as the Coordinator of Information (COI), the head of a new, civilian office attached to the White House."
COI, said historian Thomas F. Troy, was “a novel attempt in American history to organize research, intelligence, propaganda, subversion, and commando operations as a unified and essential feature of modern warfare; a ‘Fourth Arm’ of the military services.” (note: Negroponte is no Donovan)
Within 3 months of allied victory Harry S.Truman, under the recommendations of Alger Hiss destroyed the OSS splitting it in twain between the Dept.of State and the War Office.
Alot of the CIA has already been cleaned out. From the late 1970's purge...a fair amount of the old-warrior type just left. In the midst of the 1990's...a number of them left because the contracting world was growing and paying more. And today...any guy with ten years of experience can make 40 percent with a contracting company...so alot just pack and leave...especially the seasoned guys.
So right now...you have a limited number of CIA people who actually know where Cuba is on a map...and they are supposed to train five or six junior guys...and hope that half of them stay up to ten years...while the senior guys are constantly thinking of leaving for better money and more stability in their lives.
The CIA problem started out as a congressional mandate change from the 1970s and a wage issue...but its now including a leadership issue. The leadership can't take charge and put bad acting analysts into place. When you examine Both Valerie and her husband...some leadership choices in the agency were out of whack. You can change out lots of personnel...but if leadership doesn't reestablish itself...then it really doesn't matter.
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