Melvin Goodman has earned the right to be heard. Mr. Goodman, a senior fellow and director of the national security program at the Center for International Policy, author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and senior analyst at the CIA and the State Department for 24 years has been an Obama supporter from the start. His excitement throughout the long campaign was contagious as he emoted about the important and exciting changes that were certain to occur once Barack took the helm. His faith in an Obama win never wavered.
Mr. Goodman understands the nuances of Washington politics D.C. Having devoted his career to intelligent intelligence, he has been traveling the country over the past year voicing his concerns regarding the dangers created by its politicization and militarization, particularly during the last eight years, as detailed in Failure of Intelligence.
Precisely because Barack Obama has promised to be the Change We Need, the recent inclusion into the Obama transition team of several George Tenet cronies is sounding an all too familiar alarm. As Mr. Goodman wrote in an op-ed in the November 14 Baltimore Sun,(http://ciponline.org/...:
"President-elect Barack Obama is sending conflicting signals on whether he intends to change the bankrupt culture of Washington's intelligence community and to introduce genuine reform to the Central Intelligence Agency. . . .
(He) has placed the intelligence transition process in the hands of two senior cronies of former CIA Director George J. Tenet: John O. Brennan and Jami A. Miscik, who were actively engaged in implementing and defending the CIA's corrupt activities during the Bush presidency. (Mr. Brennan was also an active defender of the illegal program of warrantless eavesdropping, implemented at the National Security Agency under the leadership of Mr. Hayden, then director of NSA. . . Mr. Miscik was deputy director of intelligence for Mr. Tenet during the run-up to the Iraq war, when intelligence was manipulated to support the Bush administration's decision to use force in Iraq. He endorsed the politicized findings of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in October 2002, as well as the unclassified White Paper of October 2002 that was designed to sway votes on the authorization to use force against Iraq.)"
This is hardly the change we need, nor does it telegraph a chastened America to the rest of the world. For intelligence to function, it must be able to do so independent of politics, otherwise results can all too easily be cooked to order as they were for the Iraq War.
Mr. Goodman continues,
"Mr. Obama's apparent willingness to demilitarize the leadership of the intelligence community is an essential ingredient for changing the culture of the national security process. The Bush administration boasted of a "marriage" between the Pentagon and the CIA, which made the intelligence community subordinate to the Pentagon, which controls more than 80 percent of the intelligence budget and more than 85 percent of all intelligence personnel."
I know Melvin Goodman and think him one of the brightest, most sincerely committed men around. To hear him explain the history of his business and decry its utter loss of objectivity and independence is to understand how and why we find ourselves in the foreign policy mess we are in today.
We have lived through a torturous (no pun intended) eight years, finally arriving at the place where the collective psyche has turned introspective enough to elect, not only a black man but also a D.C. outsider. President-elect Obama plans to close Guantanamo, put an end to torture, restore the Constitution and begin the long road back to economic recovery. In doing so, it will take everything he has to turn from the embrace of some of the very architects of this most hideous chapter in our history.
As Mr. Goodman concludes,
"Mr. Obama will not be able to change the culture of the intelligence community and restore the moral compass of the CIA unless there is a full understanding and repudiation of the operational and analytical crimes committed in the Tenet era. If Mr. Obama genuinely wants to roll back the misdeeds of Vice President Dick Cheney, restore the rule of law at the CIA and create the change that Americans want and can believe in, he should not be relying for advice on the senior officials who endorsed these shameful actions."