The last time the world of U.S. intelligence was in this much disarray, it was the mid-1970s, and the American public was aghast at the sheer volume of revelations of dirty tricks, domestic surveillance and abuse of power that culminated in the nightmare crimes of the Nixon administration. In the wake of those scandals, Congress roused itself from its torpor and created a structure for oversight of intelligence. Never again would an arrogant, secretive administration be able to smuggle political reprisals and personal vendettas under a catchall “national security” umbrella.
Whoops. So 30 years later we have a parallel crisis — only this time around, the need for an effectively functioning national intelligence operation is only greater, given 9/11 and the continued possibility of attacks on U.S. citizens, yet the executive and legislative will to resolve the problem is even weaker.
We know that the CIA gave the Bush administration reasonably good intelligence pre-9/11 that it ignored. We know that in the run-up to the Iraq war the administration cherry-picked reports that supported its war plans and ignored those that didn’t. We know that in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq disaster the administration found it convenient to scapegoat the CIA. And we know that, in the absence of effective congressional oversight — as Republican committee chairmen have hobbled any serious investigations into the political and policy-making roots of these intelligence failures — the Bush administration has so far gotten away with this approach.
The fact that — after the launching of a “global war on terror” — the central pillar of American intelligence has been gutted through a bureaucratic civil war, a personnel implosion and now a bribery scandal hasn’t seemed to worry the Bush team. They never liked a CIA that failed to tell them what they wanted to hear, and they’re happy to let it rot so they can erect a different intelligence structure more compliant to their political agenda.
That seems to be the primary motivation behind the decision by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to place the U.S. military in the CIA’s former role of managing human intelligence and covert operations. Most coverage of this controversy, and the question of the appropriateness of appointing a military officer to run the CIA, has painted the story as a power struggle, in which Rumsfeld is seeking to expand his authority at the expense of the civilian CIA. That may well be the case.
But it seems to me there’s a separate aspect that most of what I’m reading has ignored. Military intelligence isn’t subject to the CIA oversights Congress mandated in the 1970s. Sure, that oversight has been ineffectual in a one-party government. But now the possibility looms of Democrats winning control of one or both houses in November. So the transfer of intelligence operations to the Pentagon looks like a tactical hatch-battening for a Bush administration that’s going to be increasingly desperate about hiding the extent of its extra-constitutional behavior.
MORE from Sidney Blumenthal. Thomas Powers’ perspective here in a New York Times op-ed, as always, is invaluable:
What finally humbled and gutted the C.I.A. after decades of Washington bureaucratic infighting was a loss of support where it counted most: the refusal of the Bush White House to accept responsibility for the two great “intelligence failures” that prompted Congress to reorganize our services…. President Bush might have accepted responsibility for these two failures. He might have followed the example of President John F. Kennedy, who took the blame for the disastrous C.I.A. attempt to put a rebel army ashore in Cuba in 1961. Instead, the administration hid the existence of the pre-9/11 warnings for as long as possible and continued to insist for many months after the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein’s illegal weapons might still turn up, and it has blocked any official investigation of its role in exaggerating the slender intelligence that existed. |
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