If we were talking about anybody else, I would accept that argument…
This article, originating from Knight Ridder Newspapers, seems to be a less Chicken Little take on the restructuring. Here’s an update from the Washington Post. It’s tough to draw any conclusions so far.
Though it’s of some concern that his appointments so far have been former GOP staffers, my hopefull guess is that this is less about the White House trying to enforce a political mindset at the CIA, and more about trying to prevent another Imperial Hubris type tell all book. The Bush administration just wants the executive branch (of which the CIA is obviously part) to give the media a united front. It’s not about the CIA’s political leanings, but about the relationship the agency has with the press.
I hope.
I think we need to have a whip around to raise funds to buy each member of the Bush administration a copy of Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly.
Incurious George doesn’t even read newspapers. Who’s going to give him the Pet Goat-level version of Tuchman, fer pity’s sake?
Of course it should, but it’s not like they know who leaked those things anyway, or they’d ALREADY be fired.
Umm…was this supposed to be comforting?
They’re trying to prevent the facts of what they do from ever getting out, so they’re stacking the deck with a whole bunch of yes-men. We know they’re yes-men because, according to what you just said, they’ll put the good of the party ahead of reality to present a ‘united front’.
-Joe
Problem is, they’re not. His main guys are a bunch of Hill staffers who went nowhere in the CIA (due to lack of talent most are saying) back when they were there in the first place. Not quite as hiring the disgruntled shipping clerks to run the business, but close. Like most of Bush’s people, unquestioning loyalty and a willingness to praise the President is looking like the only qualificaiton you need put on your resume.
Look, the main problem with the CIA is that it’s been TOO political. Goss and Bush apparently think the solution is to make it even more political: have it run by a politician, make politics a litmus test for analysis, hire political hacks instead of career analysts to run the thing, etc. It’s just a dumb dumb idea. Most of the really good people at the CIA are military hawks and language/culture analysts (who tend to lean liberal, but who also tend to be nigh irreplacable). I know some of them, and even the conservatives were quietly fuming bloody murder at the 1st Bush administration’s misuse of intelligence and the agency. This is worse: there will be people who resign not because they were asked, but because they are simply disgusted. And whats really bad is, as I said, that most of the truly liberal leaning people at the CIA tend to be precisely the people who are in very very short supply: the Arabic-speaking wunderkinds who do the really hard egghead analysis. Heck, Tenet’s estimate of it taking 5 years to really retool the agency was based MOSTLY on the fact that such people are what we really need, and they are so rare and take such a long time to train and bring on. If these are the sorts of people we can expect to see purged, that’s very very bad for the CIA.
The CIA of the past few decade or so has been the very model of effectiveness. It boggles the mind to think that such a fine organization is going through a shake-up.
Not exactly what I meant. The CIA is in dire need of an overhaul. Everybody and his brother knows that. Anonymously written “behind the scenes” books are not going to help the house cleaning in any way shape or form. This isn’t about “yes men” but a policy of not talking to the press until they figure out a plan to fix the ailing agency. Any restructuring of this size is bound to destroy a lot of buerocratic fiefdoms, and the cacophony of “anonymous” voices with a bone to pick would only hurt the reorganization effort. Hopefully, they don’t want yes men, just people who won’t run off to the press with halftruths as vengeance for being reassigned. Once a plan is in place the lockdown will be lifted. Besides, it’s not like the CIA has ever been, or indeed should be, completely transparent to the press.
So the Plame thing will be moved from the absolute back burner and up to seventeenth-from-the-front?
Are you really so hopeful?
-Joe
Can I have a hit off of whatever your smoking?
But they think that with a few new faces they can whip the department into shape? Do they know what the seasons of sports teams in “a rebuilding mode” look like? 
Sure.
<Throws Monkey With a Gun a pack of Sarcasm Lights…> 
Since the damnedable Church Commission tore into the CIA, it has been a largely useless body (well, good at going through billions of dollars.) A fire lit under their asses is in no way a bad thing.
Everyone knows that it needs a shake up. But what needs to be shaken up?
-need more actual experts, needs a ME focus
-needs to be less ego/politics driven
Apparently, “shaking up” the agency seems to mean making those things worse, not better.
Ever since the CIA was made “Central” they’ve had an ego/politics problem. To hear them tell it, only the CIA is good enough to brief the Prez. The problem is that they’re inside the Beltway and everything there is political. So, even though their job is to present facts – and specifically not to make recommendations – there’s some intellectual dishonesty going on here.
Joe Analyst watches the evening news. In fact, Joe Analyst is probably a newspaper junkie, reading Drudge, Ananova, The Times (NY and DC), and so on. When his boss comes to him and says “the President wants a briefing on Iraq’s chemical weapons programs,” he cannot just laugh and say “short fucking briefing, sir!”
He has to prepare slides in PowerPoint for his bosses’ approval, yea, up unto the highest echelons of management. So a statement that begins life in a painstakingly-wordsmithed report saying “There is no evidence to support the assertion that Saddam Hussein is actively developing WMDs” gets boiled down by his bosses into:
IRAQ WMDs:
- Long-standing program
- Probable large stockpiles
- No evidence of active development
…and a stock photo of a SCUD-B missile launcher painted desert tan to fill up the right side of the chart.
The message can actually get completely inverted, especially if the analyst is in the “finding WMD” division, and his boss wants more funding. “We haven’t found any WMDs… YET!!!” becomes the new message. The analyst probably doesn’t brief the President – he briefs the DCI, and attends the briefing in case there are technical questions. Which, in this administration, is about as likely as flying monkeys coming out of my ass.
So, the Prez asks a loaded question, gets the answer he wants because there are eleven layers of management between the analyst and his morning briefing. The solution to this problem is not an “Intelligence Czar” – especially if that job is another honorary title for the DCI, who already has too much control over the message that the Prez hears.
Add to all of that the “special cell” that Rumsfeld stood up, whom he placed on a credibility level with the DCI in morning briefings (so I heard). When anyone else writes a paper, it gets edited aggressively by nay-sayers, and everyone compromises until the published version most closely matches the truth. Any opinion is phrased “We assess” or “we believe” and in my papers, those were few and far between. When the Rumsfeld Cell (I forget what they were called) decided something was a fact (e.g. when Ahmad Chalabi called them up with information that Iran and Israel were spoon-feeding him) they would put it in a briefing without the rest of the community ever seeing it. So right away, 50% of what the President sees in that circumstance is possibly unverified bullshit – and the other 50% is so watered-down and politicized that it can be read like goat entrails. That is: it means whatever the President wants it to mean.
Our intelligence apparatus exists for one purpose: stating facts when facts are not clear. Colin Powell said it best when he asked his intel folks to “tell me what you know; tell me what you think; and tell me which is which.” That said, the information they get is confusing, contradictory, and occasionally completely wrong – and they’re asked to distill truth from it like some magic elixir. It’s hard to do right, and easy to let what you want to say change what you need to say. We need someone in charge of the CIA who will help the analysts do their jobs, and not someone who’s in it for the dog biscuits our President throws him.
P.S. it’d also be nice if he had the balls to tell Rumsfeld “Hey, Donald: this is my job, and you and your boys are full of rancid drippy pigshit.” But that’s not the sort of thing a political appointee can get away with.
Of course, all of the above is just my opinion. And I’ve been wrong before.
Actually, I think they’re outside the Beltway, if you wanna get technical.
I don’t.
While I would love to see proof that this is a purge, one has to remember, any new CEO of an operation brings in his own people when he comes on board.
There’s a difference depending on the level the employee is at. Lower level employees have civil service protection from political dismissal. Some higher level employees are there at the discretion of POTUS - these are the one’s that could be changed out like a new CEO would.
What is far more dangerous and effective is a change in the hiring structure for civil servants. If one can control who comes in now, one can heavily influence many future administration’s policy. That’s what has been done at Justice, and I hope it is not the case here.
I guess the sailors are leaving the ship to the rats!