When George Tenet fell on his sword to protect President Bush, he loyally took the rap for the CIA's failure to prevent 9/11 as well as for the hyped Iraq intelligence. (Here's a new definition of chutzpah for you: Pressure your team of professional intelligence analysts to tell you only what you want to hear, then turn around and blame them when it turns out to be wrong.) Now, in the aftermath of the 9/11 commission's recommendations on how to reform the intelligence community and less than three months before the election, Bush has made his choice to replace Tenet as CIA director: Representative Porter Goss, Republican of Florida and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. As Bush pointed out when announcing the nomination, Goss was with the CIA before running for Congress, so he has experience in the world of intelligence.
But is he the right man for the job?
As we saw so painfully clearly in the run-up to the Iraq invasion and its aftermath, intelligence must remain nonpolitical and independent. Politicizing or otherwise skewing intelligence to please those in power tends to make it worthless. And since attitude flows down from the top, it stands to reason that the job of CIA director must be similarly nonpartisan.
Goss, however, is anything but nonpartisan. As one of the White House's most ferocious defenders in Congress, Goss has gone out of his way numerous times to protect the President and attack his critics. In fact, he was appointed by the Bush campaign to rebut a major speech by Senator John Kerry back in June on the subject of intelligence, calling Kerry's comments "me-tooism."
He attacked the Democrats in general and Kerry in particular, saying "the Democratic party [does] not support the intelligence community." With "somebody send me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation," he rejected requests for a committee investigation of the vengeful "outing" of a CIA agent in retaliation for her husband's saying the White House lied when claiming that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa as part of a nuclear program. He led party-line votes blocking investigations of the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal and Administration dealings with former Iraqi favorite son Ahmad Chalabi.
These raise serious doubts that Goss can run the CIA with the political independence it so badly needs.
Goss' CIA history also raises concerns that he may well be too closely intertwined with the intelligence system to run it effectively. The 9/11 commission's final report recommended the appointment of a single official responsible for coordinating the intelligence work currently conducted by various agencies, including the CIA and the Defense Department. Rather than seize the opportunity to make real and badly needed changes, Goss' first reaction to the report was instinctively to protect his former colleagues, putatively embracing the commission's findings while stalling as much as possible.
And if that weren't enough, the timing of the nomination gives Republicans an opening to bash Goss' critics. Any inconvenient questions can be answered with a broadside attacking the questioner as unpatriotically standing in the way of intelligence reform, making it a wedge issue for the election.
To their credit, when his name was first floated after Tenet's resignation, some Republicans in Congress saw a Goss nomination as politically a lost cause. The battle to confirm such an obviously partisan nominee to what should be a nonpartisan position would be so bruising to be ultimately not worth it. But after the nomination was announced yesterday, all dissent was squashed, and the GOP loyally fell into lockstep.
Goss' history as a political partisan and his reluctance to embrace change even when needed makes his nomination to head the CIA a troubling one. At the very least, acting Director John McLaughlin should stay on the job until after the election, when the issue loses its political sting.
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