President Bush has nominated Congressman Porter Goss of Florida to be the director of Central Intelligence. A former undercover intelligence operative, Goss recognizes, "The essence of our intelligence capability is people." This is something American intelligence agencies have seemingly forgotten. In America's satellite and analysis heavy intelligence, India and Pakistan's test detonations of nuclear weapons caught us off guard. Intelligence imagined a genocide of ethnic Kosovar Albanians. It mistook a Sudanese medicine factory for a chemical weapons plant. It failed to connect the dots leading to 9/11. And the past director of Central Intelligence believed the case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction a "slam dunk."
Collecting intelligence has always been an imperfect art. Never more so than it has been in the last decade.
Did you hear John Kerry said he would go to war even if he KNEW there were no WMDs?
Check Fox. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
Been hearing that the Goss is in for a tough grilling pending his appointment. The Dems are saying that he may be a 'partisan' righty.
Hmmmm, that's awfully PARTISAN of them.
On a related thought, does anybody stop to consider who John Kerry might have in his administration in the scary case that he actually pulls off getting elected to the Presidency?
A cabinet where Ted Kennedy could actually be in control of a real position of power? Where Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson might be part of Presidential decision making?
Be very afraid.
One reason our human intelligence has been so bad for so long is that we have not had (and still don't have) an executive branch willing to throw congressmen (Shelby or Hatch e.g.) in the slammer for divulging intelligence to the media.
We have this basic problem where the CIA and other intelligence outfits are rightly scared to death to share info with Congress b/c these pols repeatedly leak info which compromises their intelligence gathering capabilities. It is a conflict between a screaming whiny "democratic" media which demands "full disclosure" (well, I guess they always say "the American People have a right to know") and congressmen incapable of keeping their mouths shut. Every single congressmen (even Cynthia McKinney when she was my rep, yuck!) has the right to see every classified document . . . that is the way it should be, I suppose, but when people like Shelby and Hatch can repeatedly violate the secrecy of intelligence meetings and documents with impunity how can we expect to ever have serious intel?
In order to have actual human intelligence in any foreign nation it requires easily a dozen or so years just to get the people trained and in place on the ground. It is all an extremely delicate operation. Every time a congressmen reveals some piece of intel all of that extraordinary amount of investment in time and money is wasted and whole operations get ruined. Every piece of intel reveals to those in the foreign countries how that intel was gathered, they have tell-tale signs basically. How many blown covers does it take before the CIA decides that it just isn't worth their effort to put their agents in the field in harm's way?
This is how you end up with an intelligence community which relies on foreign governments intel. And don't kid yourself that our congressional loose lips don't also affect whether foreign governments are willing to give us actual good intelligence, they too want to protect their own operations.
We don't need to compromise our republican government (congressmen can still see intel) but we should compromise this "democratic" accretion that the American people have a "right" to know and start throwing congressmen in a federal pen for a few years. That would stop up these leaks in a heartbeat and allow the CIA to regain confidence in its ability to successfully execute human intel gathering missions.
