David Brooks wrote extensively about the current CIA purge in the
New York Times on November 13 (edited, with emphasis and italics added).
The administration is clearly going after its perceived enemies in the CIA. I seem to remember that this sort of thing has happened before, and it almost always backfires.
Remember: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer
David Brooks wrote about the purge in the
New York Times on November 13 (edited, with emphasis and italics added):
The C.I.A. Versus Bush
By DAVID BROOKS
Now that he's been returned to office, President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. -His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.-
Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration.
Brooks has put his characteristic conservative spin on the issue:
At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. officials, -who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy-, served up leak after leak to discredit the president's Iraq policy.
Maybe they were just doing their duty as civil servants
There were leaks of prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of interagency memos. In mid-September, somebody leaked a C.I.A. report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior C.I.A. official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world.
Well, Duh...
...the C.I.A. permitted an analyst - who, we now know, is Michael Scheuer - to publish anonymously a book called "Imperial Hubris," which criticized the Iraq war. Here was an official on the president's payroll publicly campaigning against his boss.
Memo to self... stop by Borders on the way home... pick up Scheuer's book....
Nor is this feud over. C.I.A. officials are now busy undermining their new boss, Porter Goss. One senior official called one of Goss's deputies, who worked on Capitol Hill, a "Hill Puke," and said he didn't have to listen to anything the deputy said. ...
Brooks is all for this "housecleaning", as he verbalizes the intent of the administration and congressional leaders:
Meanwhile, members of Congress and people around the executive branch are wondering what President Bush is going to do to punish the mutineers. A president simply cannot allow a department or agency to go into campaign season opposition and then pay no price for it. If that happens, employees of every agency will feel free to go off and start their own little media campaigns whenever their hearts desire.
Never mind that they were just trying to get the truth out to the American public... Meanwhile, as Brooks reminds us, it could be much worse. We could have barbarians in control...
If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes. As it is, the answer to the C.I.A. insubordination is not just to move a few boxes on the office flow chart.
Oh Yeah, and then what? Slap them around a little. Fire a few to set some examples.
The answer is to define carefully what the president expects from the intelligence community: information. Policy making is not the C.I.A.'s concern. It is time to reassert some harsh authority so C.I.A. employees know they must defer to the people who win elections, so they do not feel free at meetings to spout off about their contempt of the White House, so they do not go around to their counterparts from other nations and tell them to ignore American policy.
In short, people in the C.I.A. need to be reminded that the person the president sends to run their agency is going to run their agency, and that if they ever want their information to be trusted, they can't break the law with self-serving leaks of classified data.
Oh-Oh. This sounds serious. Maybe they will be charged with treason.
This is about more than intelligence. It's about Bush's second term. Is the president going to be able to rely on the institutions of government to execute his policies, or, by his laxity, will he permit the bureaucracy to ignore, evade and subvert the decisions made at the top? *If the C.I.A. pays no price for its behavior, no one will pay a price for anything, and everything is permitted.* That, Mr. President, is a slam-dunk.
Oh, and by the way, you remember what I told you during the campaign about John Kerry. Well, it turns out that what I said was not true. Not that I lied, mind you. I just sort of screwed up. Sorry about that, John:
Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error.
Pffffftttt!