While the stature and role of the CIA were greatly diminished under Goss during the congressionally ordered reorganization of the intelligence agencies, his counterpart at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, continued his aggressive efforts to develop a clandestine intelligence operation within his department. The Pentagon’s human intelligence unit and its other clandestine military units are expanding in number and authority. Rumsfeld recently won the ability to sidestep U.S. ambassadors in certain circumstances when the Pentagon wants to send in clandestine teams to collect intelligence or undertake operations.
"Rumsfeld keeps pressing for autonomy for defense human intelligence and for SOF [Special Forces] operations," said retired Army Col. W. Patrick Lang, former head of Middle East affairs at the Defense Intelligence Agency. "CIA has lost the ability to control the [human intelligence] process in the community."
Now, "the real battle lies between" Negroponte and Rumsfeld, said retired Army Lt. Gen. Donald Kerrick, a former deputy national security adviser and once a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. "Rumsfeld rules the roost now."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/05/AR2006050501738.html
I know nothing about the inner workings of the clock; I can barely tell time.
But this
the real battle lies between” Negroponte and Rumsfeld …
reads like one of those good news-bad news jokes.
Is it?
What Rumsfeld have done is to create a kind of super GRU working both domestically and abroad. Negroponte controlling Rumsfeld is a joke. As is the so called intelligence reform that created his position. Most of the U.S. intelligence agencies are still under Rumsfeld’s direct control. With little or no oversight from the outside. And he is creating new ones like the strategic support branch apparently without informing anyone outside of the pentagon.
But how successful is this going to be institutionally once the Secreatay of Defene is replaced?
‘Course, most of the intelligence budget is already under Rumsfeld (NSA part of DOD) so it seems there’s a structural problem built into the DNI set-up.
I wonder what problems this creates on the ground in Country X — that is, having DOD take over both State and CIA functions. If I’m in Country X’s Foriegn Office and I need to get stuff done, do I talk to the Ambassodor’s guy or the military attache or the “dark” Special Forces crew. Or do I have to go through my own military to line up the connections? If I am in X’s spy service, do I talk to the CIA guy at the Embassy or go to the SF guy? Confusing when viewed from the other side?
I’m just an ordinary civilian, meaning that I have absolutely no idea how my tax dollars are being spent.
If the battle is between Rumsfeld and Negroponte, I have no one to root for.
Since much of the institutional change is based on how the pentagon lawyers define the “war on terror” as ongoing and indefinite I suspect the change is permanent. I wonder how republicans will like all that power in the hands of a President Clinton.
When it comes to the DNI this clip seems to say everything. URL to whole story below.
…there seems to be a new, relaxed John Negroponte. And some close observers think they know why.
He’s figured out the job. Which is to say, he really doesn’t have much control over the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.
Continue read about the three hour lunches.
http://public.cq.com/public/20060303_homeland.html
Babak, not “when” the Secretary of Defense is replaced, but “if” the Secretary of Defense is replaced. Doesn’t look like these guys are going anywhere; just digging in.
Is there really a turf battle? Isn’t Cheney effectively in control of the national security apparatus?
If CIA spooks Drumheller’s and Pillar’s revelations are correct, then the CIA did get Iraq right (WMD & AQ connection) and Bush-Cheney knew the facts.
So it would seem the real turf battle is to get all the spook agencies to provide “intelligence” that fits the deciders decisions with no contrary analysis and facts that could be leaked.
ckrantz
The 3 hout lunches are meetings. that is where the real busineness is conducted. pl
Babak
This is not really about circumstances and personalities. It is about long standing distortions in the intelligence community which may be rectified by Negroponte if he is succesful in pursuing his institutional ambitions. pl
ckratz
“strategic support branch” what’s that? pl
Col:
Wapo piece on SSB.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29414-2005Jan22?language=printer
For balance the official version:
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2005/n01252005_2005012510.html
Will any of this really matter in the end? This administration ignores any and all intelligence information that clashes with their preconceptions. They know what the truth is, the function of the various intelligence services is to gather information, no matter how dubious the source, that supports the neo con agenda and their predilection for violent solutions to diplomatic and political problems.
All,
How can there be a battle between the DNI and the SecDef when Secretary Rumsfeld consistently states, “I am not in the intelligence business”? Most recently, he declared this when answering McGovern in Atlanta. The diffusion of accountability is amazing when the guy with the most beans doesn’t know he’s in the bean business.
Negroponte vs. Rumsfeld?
They are in the same team. Remember the mini smear job a couple of months back where negroponte said to spend hours a day in some massage parlor? That was an internal agency battle. Goss lost. (Goss isn’t that bright anyway compared to Negroponte)
CIA is utterly alone now. It has nobody. I give it several more month, when that huge Iraq embassy is done. Then The whole thing will get sucked into blackhole of bureaucratic confusion.
The momentum of Iraq war will eat up institutional coherency and twist reality even further.
The combined dci/cia under negroponte will distort so much information, nobody will know the truth anymore.
Ya think Zarqawi is evil now, according to Pentagon propaganda, wait several more months, Zarqawi will fly faster than superman and climb tall building like spiderman. (Osama who? Probably Pentagon wills tart saying, Zarqawi is now the leader of Al qaeda and Osama doesn’t really matter)
and we gonna start spending up north of $100B/year in Iraq soon.
We’ll increase troop significantly after big some big insurgency offense. GOP is going for broke.
Iran will have nuke, get out of NPT, and start supplying their people in Iraq with weapons.
and within 5 years we will have an open regional war in the middle east.
So far all my bad scenario has panned out to be true. So I am continuing my streak.
The war in Iraq has now entered different phase where it distort our domestic politics beyond PR campaign. GOP is in panick mode.
Pray hard, they don’t do something stupid. (like crashing the entire national economy for eg)
I’m just an ordinary civilian, meaning that I have absolutely no idea how my tax dollars are being spent.
Posted by: John Howley | 06 May 2006 at 02:59 PM
It means just that. We lost institutional coherency. Everybody will do turf battle for now on. And ultimately we lost everything, because we can’t keep it straight.
Our ambassador will say one thing, the black section will say another. And rival country will be able to play those differences and crack the whole thing.
Pentagon will become a mini nation creating its own diplomatic policy. Ya think the neocons are evil now, soon installing a few people inside pentagon will get them foreign policy too, instead of military analysis stove piping.
Bargain basement price. Cheap military power and global diplomacy using less than 300 people.
Is it because commitment to the enterprise is lost both in the government service and in large corporation (“Après mois le Deluge!”)?
It all reminds me of the Godfather. Recall the line? Here is my version: “Negroponte is a pimp. He can never out fight the Iron Triangle HQ’d at the Pentagon”
The guy is a gangster. And not because of his name. But because of his actions. His left a disaster in his wake in Iraq. And he was promoted for his loyality. He is a walking, talking symbol for what is wrong with the nation.
I don’t believe this is a power struggle. Rumsfeld has been in charge of intelligence for a very long time.
The real story is Hookergate. This administration doesn’t give two hoots about America’s security … what they are interested in is appealing to their base. They can’t tolerate a sex scandal because they have to appeal to their voters who would be shocked if this administration is linked with sex and bribery. So to contain it, they made up this struggle between Negroponte and Rumsfeld. Rove is at the wheel again doing damage control. Better to contain it now than to wait for Goss to be proven implicated in the scandal and be forced to resign at a later date.
Disruption similar to the Church Committee?
Oil shocks, demoralizing moral efforts, lots of Latin America moving leftward, dollar weakening…
Deja vu? The seventies all over again. The president a hybrid Nixon/Carter?
Disruption similar to the Church Committee?
angela | 07 May 2006 at 03:31 PM
Obviously the last Church comitte doesn’t work. Or at least the system soon snap back to business as usual after a decade or so.
The only way to cure it is to actually take out those people and put it in death row.
we wouldn’t have to deal with Ford adminsitration criminals this time round had we put them all in death row last time. It saves lives too.
All
You conspiracy theorists should read the Time story on this.
Most of what happens in Washington can be explained in terms of bureaucratic politics.
CIA is dead meat except as a specialized clandestine service. pl
@ Pat:
A little OT, but why not.
What do you make of all SecDef’s special ops teams going out into the world and helping the appatent scores of nations “threatened” by terrorists.
Seems like a recipe for One, two, many Vietnams, to paraphrase the motorcycle diary man; and “many” in a dark, self-inflicted way, given the competence quotient of the current governmental clowns.
Back to my funk hole now, to effect some improvements.
Col. Lang,
I would not so readily dismiss the perspectives above as being the fevered thoughts of “conspiracy theorists”,
Negroponte has been a tool – an enforcer – for the darker elements of clandestine services (and the Bush family) going back to at least the early eightees. And Rumsfeld has been a loyal tool for the same crowd. I find it extremely hard to believe that any conflict exists – or is allowed to exists – between them. They’ve always played for the same team and been fed from the same hand. It is more reasonable to assume that talk of conflict is manufactured tripe, a smoke screen.
Furthermore, it does not matter if there is a “conspiracy” or not. Cows moo and dogs bark. These are craven men. The end product will closely resemble what the “conspiracy theorists” imagine, regardless.
this tnr article from a couple of months ago is definitely worth a read:
The CIA will not easily cede this or other human intelligence operations, which are central to its reason for being; earlier this month, Goss prepared a plan to bolster CIA human intelligence significantly. Whether he will have Negroponte’s backing is unclear. “[Negroponte] may be swayed by whatever his experience, good or bad, with the CIA vis-à-vis the Pentagon has been in Iraq,” says a recently departed senior CIA official. That may not be a good sign for the Agency. In late November, the CIA’s Baghdad station chief cabled back to Washington that sectarian violence was likely to worsen due to the weakness of the interim Iraqi government. Negroponte filed a written dissent, arguing that the Falluja military operation against the insurgency had been more effective than the station chief believed. The station chief left Iraq after a yearlong tour; Negroponte reportedly played a behind-the-scenes role in his reassignment.
…
Negroponte may also have a back channel. According to a former Pentagon official, Negroponte’s deputy, Lieutenant General Michael Hayden of the National Security Agency, “has an excellent relationship with Cambone. … Because Negroponte is going to have Hayden as his deputy, my view is that Defense is not going to be an immediate enemy, and there’s not going to be an immediate problem with Pentagon-DNI coordination.”
…
While Negroponte’s supporters hope that he can overcome these institutional restraints on his power, his rivals surely hope he gets a different message. As Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy expert at the Federation of American Scientists, puts it, “The fact that he is a transplant, simply being relocated from an existing position, means that no new departure is contemplated.” Unfortunately, a departure may be precisely what’s needed.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050307&s=ackerman030705
Linda
CIA has lost. pl
Eric
Hey. Its a crusade man. pl
All
Some of the comments on this remind me of the Canadian woman who said to me in the “Houses of Parliament” in Ottawa that she could “never forgive the Americans for their wilful destruction of Vietnamese culture.” I asked her if she had been to Vietnam or knew anything of the place first hand. The answer was no. pl
Point taken. While I don’t think personal experience is THE only thing that counts, it certainly gives unique insight.
For some things you don’t need to have been there. The cratering of vast swaths of Vietnamese and Laotian jungle are one thing that can be dismissed as ‘cosmetic’ by the spurious, much like the consequences of attrition tactics for the civilians will be dismissed by them as ‘such is war’ — the remains of the defoiling operations that still cripple children from birth on and has caused cancer in U.S. veterans are something else. If dioxide related cancer killed and still kills veterans it quite likely kill and still kills Vietnamese vets and civilians as well.
Vietnam was, if I read the accounts right, started in the wrong understanding, that, by fighting the Vietnamese, the U.S. would roll back China, and that ‘or else’ they win, that is, that the Asian States would drop like the dominoes to the reds. It was a war of choice to counter that perceived threat, very much like Iraq was such a war of choice. So far, so good, or so bad.
The only thing that’s really bugging me about the U.S. and Vietnam is that America seems to refuse to take responsibility for her actions. There is no, ‘sorry folks, but our ideological template was incorrect, apologies for the inconvenience’ let alone ‘sorry for the dioxine, here are reparations for the birth defected and cancer cases’. Quite the opposite. Sure, they allowed some of their ‘good guys’ into the U.S. when they had to leave Vietnam. But condition for re-opening diplomatic relations, was the U.S. demand that Vietnam renounces claims for reparations.
‘Our cause was just, motives were pure, if something went nasty, blame the commies!’ That’s like a twelve-years-old’s excuse, ‘sorry mom, but it happened to me! And besides, I didn’t mean to …’ (oddly, that one never helped to spare me the slap on the head) … ancient history, let’s rather forget about it quickly. It would certainly surprise me to see an American politico stand up to the American people and the world and apologise to the people of either Vietnam or Iraq. Iraqis demanding reparations will probably be considered ingrates after all the U.S. did for them … or to them, I can’t quite decide.
That I don’t write to mock U.S. motives, or the motives of the individual soldiers, or say the commies were nice guys (they clearly weren’t). But how much are motives worth in the end?
An uncle of mine said, honestly I believe, that for him was all about fighting Communsism, or Bolshevism as he put it, when he invaded Russia with the Wehrmacht. I, too, think he served honourably. I never asked him, but does that change anything about that he helped enable all the atrocities taking place just behind the frontline? I don’t think one can separate the war into a good parts and the bad parts, and choose the good parts to identify himself with. It’s one. For the perception of a nation and her actions that’s all what counts.
How did Graham Green put it again? ‘I have never met a man who had better motives for all the mayhem he caused.’ That probably applies well to America, and certainly so for the neo-cons.
Negroponte is by most accounts not a neocon ideologue but a pragmatic realist or put it in another way a political operative who gets the job done. He in many cases sounds more like Rumsfeld who is certainly no ideologue.
That CIA is roadkill seems fairly obvious but the more interesting question is what comes instead. A ministry of intelligence or a pentagon run intelligence community.
Is the merging of intelligence, law enforcement and military intelligence functions in one organisation reaching down into the local sheriffs departments and out to most countries in the world a good thing. Paranoia? Maybe but it’s huge amount of power being centralized wihtout any real debate or oversight. Only the promise to prevent another 9/11.
Pat Lang, as usual, cut straight to the heart of the matter–bureaucratic politics. Bureaucracies are harder to kill than cockroaches. Arguably, the CIA took the fall for 9-11 and Iraq intelligence failures. Fairly or unfairly, someone has to take responsibility. The Intelligence Reform Act set up the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. If you compare the mission statements of the two agencies (assuming they are accurate), the DNI replaced the DCI. This much is known.
Connecting the dots over the last few years leaves me with two distinct impressions: first, some of the current and former CIA employees are less than amused with shouldering the blame for the aforementioned failures. The steady drip of classified information from unanimous sources and criticisms from former CIA types like Johnson and McGovern seem to support a high degree of resentment. Second, it appears likely that President Bush made Goss the DCI to guide the agency towards a lesser role than it enjoyed under the provisions of the 1947 National Security Act, to clean house of potential trouble makers, and to discourage the rest from talking. The resultant demoralization of the CIA has been grist for the news mill for a while. Politics can be brutal on dedicated people.
Now we have a story of Secretary Rumsfeld seeking to expand the DoD’s intelligence duties into areas formerly under the CIA’s purview. This makes perfect sense if the CIA’s premiere position in the secret squirrel business is losing pride of place. The DoD has the budget and personnel to operate in this business, and, presumably, the Office of the DNI has something in the works along this line as well. Former DCI Tenet testified that the CIA had in front of it a several-years-long effort to reacquire its lost humint capabilities. Why not develop these capabilities under new management and corporate cultures as well?
My conclusion is that the CIA has a long rebuilding project in front of it. Meanwhile, the DNI and the DoD have picked up the CIA’s missions in many instances along with the DNI becoming the primary presidential intelligence adviser. And, at long last, the DoD has finally figured out that gee wiz gadgets don’t get the job done on their own. Just a thought.
Oh yea, I think the Secretary of Defense has always ruled the intelligence roost by virtue of budget and cabinet position.
Rummy is always in the drivers seat in any bureaucratic spat as he represents Cheney. As PL believes the CIA is roadkill and now with Gen. Hayden the new nominee the Pentagon has effectively taken over.
But what is interesting is that the CIA got Iraq right in terms of facts and intelligence – no WMD, no Saddam-AQ connection. However, they did not play ball with Bush-Cheney to fix the facts around invasion while Rummy’s Pentagon intelligence was fabricating pro-war intelligence out of whole cloth.
The CIA is being devastated and brought to heel because they were not willing to be entirely an organ for domestic political gain and the private “intelligence” arm of the regime.
C’mon Col. – give us your take on Hayden.
all
Hayden is a very effective and well qualified military intelligence officer of the air variety. so far as I know he has rarely done anything else for 40 years. He has worked in every aspect of intelligence except clandestine HUMINT. He is not an aviator.
He is not in the least afraid of Rummy. Hayden’s bosses will be Negroponte and the prez. His new command gets its money directly from Congress. DoD has nothing to say about it. In fact, some of Rummy’s toys in the intelligence business are funded from the General Intelligence Program which either Haydon or Negroponte now control.
His job at the new CIA will be to get them to accept and excel at their new and future mission in life. That mission is to be the national clandestine HUMINT agency.
His appointment at CIA represents a stage in Negroponte’s drive to consolidate real control of the intelligence community under the DNI.
Negroponte will now seek to deprive Rummy of some of the independence that he has been claiming. This should be fun to watch.
DoD will be challenged over the claim that it does not have to coordinate clandestine HUMINT and covert action missions with the rest of the government. pl
John
Not so.
The DCI always had a lot of levers to pull. Budget is a RESULT of the “Policy, planning and Budgeting Process” not the other way around. In other words, the DCI had to be convinced every year to let the line items recommended by DoD be funded. As for NSA’s money it is in the “Signals Intelligence Program.” The control of SECDEFs before Rummy over this program was tenuous at best.
The DCI controlled the “General Intelligence Program” which is where the strategic intelligence assets of DoD get their money. The tactical activities are programmed and funded in what are called TIARA funds. They are in the service budgets. pl
But hasn’t General Hayden’s field of experience been more the technical side than human intelligence gathering?
Colonel, could you please amplify where his expertise in that aspect of the CIA intelligence has been gained?
So is this the return of the realists in national security. It would be interesting to know how Negroponte/Hayden stand in relation to Cheney/Rumsfeld.
By the way anyone else notice how trying to understand national security policy is very similar to Kremlinology nowdays.
pl,
What is/was the proportion of TIARA funds to General Intelligence Program funds?
canuck
He is going to be their boss. He is not going to recruit and run agents (agents in this case meaning foreign spies). pl
John
Interestng question. I suspect that the answer is classified. pl
Hayden may be a “very effective and well qualified military intellegence officer” but he is an idiot, and a rather arrogant one at that, when it comes to the 4th Amendment. Follow link,
http://tbogg.blogspot.com/ and scroll half way down the page for the transcript.
I know what their position is whether they will admit it or not because this is MY field of expertise. They are jettisioning the ‘probable cause’ standard, indeed, they are jettisioning all standards when it come to searching and seizing digital records that are reviewed by non-human ‘eyes’.
I must have been channeling Nostradamus last night.
Here it comes:THE THIRD FRONT IN THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR
If Butch and Sundance hook up with the Ghosts of Che, Mengele, and Borman, things could get nasty.
The Onion staff couldn’t come up with a terrist theat this interesting if they thought about it a thousand years.
Colonel,
What’s your take on this?
“Hayden going to head CIA is John Negroponte’s effort to wrest some of the ground back from Rumsfeld in the intelligence wars underway. Hayden directed the National Security Agency before joining Negroponte as his Deputy. Hayden will still report to Negroponte — and Hayden’s familiary and expertise with the military dimensions of intelligence will help Negroponte set Rumsfeld back a few squares.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001382.php
The Porter Goss-fired Super Spy Steve Kappes is Returning as Hayden’s Deputy at CIA
“Negroponte and Hayden are serious. They are attempting to restore order and morale at a beleaguered CIA and knock back Rumsfeld’s intel imperialism that has been a thorn in Hayden’s and Negroponte’s side this last year. Hayden plans to bring back Steve Kappes, who was an early casualty of Porter Goss’s tenure.”
I don’t know how accurate the NY Sun is, but here’s their take on the subject:
http://www.nysun.com/article/32294?access=746351
Col. –
You’re calling Hayden’s new job “his new command.” But what happens to his old command? i.e., his active duty military status? How can he serve two superior officers? What if he gets conflicting orders? Is he “on loan” from the Pentagon? I don’t get it.
[Forgive me if you’ve already answered this somewhere.]
Lina
It does not work like that. Hayden’s personal status as an active duty officer is irrelevant to the question of for whom he works.
The mere posession of rank does not entitle one to tell someone what to do. You have to be in the person’s chain of command.
He will have only one “boss” and that will be Negroponte. pl
Michael
By law, Negroponte now “wears” one of the two “hats” (jobs) that the CIA director used to have.
Negroponte’s hat is the one with which the CIA Director was the “chairman” of all the agencies of the intelligence community. Hayden”s “hat” will be the one with which the CIA director was the head of the CIA.
why was this made the law? It is because the Congress believed that the CIA director had used his community hat to benefit the CIA at the expense of the other agencies and that over a long period of time this had been counter-productive. pl
PL,
three brief question:
First, don’t we see Rumsfeld trying the same thing, using his ‘hat’, or his wallet rather (iirc 80% of the intel budged go through the Pentagon anyway), for expanding DoD spying on cost of the CIA?
Second, do you think that by bringing back Kappes, Negroponte tries to roll back parts of the purge Goss seems to have done at the CIA?
Third, do you think that Negroponte will be able to overcome the habitual hostility from the Team-B ilk toward the CIA as far as insufficiently dire, or politically correct, anaylysis is concerned?
PS, a fourth question: Would Hayden as an active military officer still be under Rumsfelds control, or would he be, in case he becomes CIA head, out of Rumsfeld’s chain of command and report to Negroponte only?
Seems to me that the future of the CIA is Kappes. That is, Kappes comes in as the undeclared heir-apparent.
Not that Hayden is a caretaker, but I see him managing up – Negroponte and Rumsfeld – leaving Kappes to re-configure the CIA. At some point Hayden retires, Kappes comes into his own, and hopefully the CIA ends up being a very well-run HUMINT outift.
Not a bad outcome, in my book.
Norbert
Rumsfeld is a further obstacle to implementation of the Intelligence reform legislation that flowed from the 9/11 Commision Report. We will see if he will be more able to block implementation of that law than goss was. One problem that he has is that Negroponte has program control over some of that 80% of the community money that Rumsfeld spends.
Kappes will be on board as the technical HUMINT operations expert whose job is to implement CIA’s new and more limited role as the national HUMINT operations agency.
CIA is no longer the national estimator. That function has moved to direct DNI control.
An active military officer (or a retired military officer) serving outside Defense is in no way under Defense control. pl
I suspect in a couple of years we’ll have a lawerly inquiry into why US intelligence failed to prevent another 9-11 followed by the creation of another lair of feuding agencies on top of the bar room brawl between the existing ones. From this side of the pond US intelligence looks like a sorrier mess than before the twin towers fell, this is a remarkable achievement.
I’m rather uncomfortable with the Pentagon dominating US intelligence given the tragic farce of the OSP. HUMINT will likely consist of muscular, black clad types ab-sailing out of expensive helicopters to their death and all analysis will be doing is justifying the next pork laden procurement round.
If Kappes is so good and so well respected, why didn’t they bring him back instead of going for Hayden? Also, I read that Hayden has not done well with our taxes, not well at all, in fact very badly. But what the heck, there’s more Chinese money where that came from and the war profiteers will be counting theirs while we are struggling to pay for all that was blown up in Iraq, and probably Iran, and anywhere else Bush thinks will gild his legacy.
“Negroponte and Hayden are serious. They are attempting to restore order and morale at a beleaguered CIA and knock back Rumsfeld’s intel imperialism that has been a thorn in Hayden’s and Negroponte’s side this last year. Hayden plans to bring back Steve Kappes, who was an early casualty of Porter Goss’s tenure.”
This all sounds very Machiavellian and reads like the latest addition of National Enquirer.
With all due respect, it must be BS.
If the Decider in Chief has a problem with Rumsfeld – or anyone else – why play these silly games? Why not just cause him to resign?
These people are all on the same team and they have been for a long while. This all reads like a consolidation of power for the team as opposed to a carefully crafted internal game of chess.
Bush is the CEO president. Consequently he allows his administration the play of the market to determine their policy. Who in the GOP could possibly disagree with such a market driven approach?
Avedis,
It, this alledged split, IS “BS”, in my opinion, if it is proffered as the reason Goss is out. I’m sure such a turf battle is indeed raging. But I would suggest people keep their eye on the money trail. The bribes for Defense/DHS contracts. I’m for keeping my eye on the doughnut, and not on the hole. I do not buy the siren songs of the coincidentalists, who counsel us that all these coincidents are just that. Coincidents. Its the money!
One would think Hayden already had three strikes against him
1) he was in charge of NSA on 9/11 and learned about it by watching CNN (OK, it could happen to anyone, and no one else was cashiered either.)
2) The 4-th amendment problems
associated with “friendly agreements” with ATT (but not QWest) to tap into fiber optic
lines without FISA supervision. (OK, all patriots do what is necessary to protect the country without worrying about legal niceties.)
3) The Captain AmErika favoritism problem which everyone knows about but
no one mentions (because it’s all been shown by military justice to be just an
angry ex-husband’s tirade unbased in fact).
In all likelihood, these “strikes” will turn out to be
nothing more than foul balls, and the general will walk to his
new base.
What Rumsfeld have done is to create a kind of super GRU working both domestically and abroad. Negroponte controlling Rumsfeld is a joke. As is the so called intelligence reform that created his position. Most of the U.S. intelligence agencies are still under Rumsfeld’s direct control. With little or no oversight from the outside. And he is creating new ones like the strategic support branch apparently without informing anyone outside of the pentagon.
Posted by: ckrantz | 06 May 2006 at 02:30 PM
yep. my thought exactly. There is a massive turf battle and Bushco people in Pentagon are winning. Plus they now they need to eleminate CIA, because CIA still doesn’t go along with the Iraq lies. the CIA doesn’t want to cover for Bush. So now Bushco are dismanteling CIA and moving the pieces to Pentagon.
When this is done, the damage will be massive. Pentagon will become a mini nation states that can create their own information and diplomatic policy. (hell, they can kill people to CYA too. Who can tell if there is “accident” in faraway places? who is going to investigate?)
If Hayden gets his job in CIA. It’s over for CIA for sure. end of story.