Panetta for CIA Chief is an Excellent Choice

A Washington Times commentary applauds Obama's selection of Leon Panetta to head the CIA: "In selecting Leon Panetta as head of the CIA, Mr. Obama has chosen a trusted person whose loyalty is assured, a person he will support when the going gets tough. George W. Bush erred in not immediately replacing CIA chief George Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton administration.The CIA is meant to be America's early warning system, providing the intelligence that is used to prevent attack. But the CIA has become a bureaucratic creature, loyal only to itself, and its ability to produce human source intelligence is dismal. Reliance upon it is our major national security weakness." The author of the commentary is "Ishmael Jones,.. a former Central Intelligence Agency case officer who focused on human sources with access to intelligence on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. His assignments included more than 15 years of continuous overseas service. He is the author of, "The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture," the first book written by a deep-cover CIA case officer." Mr Jones believes that: "Americans may disagree on the reasons for our lack of preparedness prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and our response to those attacks in the subsequent Afghan and Iraq wars, but we should agree that much of the intelligence provided to President Bush by the CIA was false or nonexistent." Mr. Jones is correct in asserting that: "The current head, Michael Hayden, should be removed as soon as possible. He'll go off to enrich himself by joining the boards of the CIA contracting companies he has helped make wealthy. Mr. Hayden has presided over the extraordinary growth of the CIA within the United States and its corresponding lack of hard intelligence-gathering ability overseas." The question remains unanswered if Mr. Bush acquiesced in Hayden's activities. Jones speaks of the need for "Fierce loyalty to Mr. Obama (that) must be the first requirement of the new CIA chief. He should not only prevent the CIA from undermining Mr. Obama but push the CIA to change, to perform, to provide the intelligence that will help avoid another Bay of Pigs, Iranian hostage crisis, Iraq weapons of mass destruction controversy or any of the modern foreign policy crises in which the CIA's incompetence has undercut presidents." Mr. Jones believes that: "CIA bureaucrats must be made to understand that their new boss holds the full support of the president of the United States. Only two CIA chiefs in recent decades have sought to bring change to the CIA: John Deutch,a Democratic appointee, and Porter Goss, a Republican, and both were quickly expelled from their positions by CIA bureaucrats. Mr. Obama must back his choice squarely in the face of certain and ferocious CIA rebellion to any change." Mr. Jones warns Mr. Obama that: "A president's duty is to protect Americans. If Mr. Obama, the candidate of change, proves to have exposed Americans to attack by not introducing change to the American institution most in need of it, he will no longer be our president in four years, and history will remember him as an excellent orator but a failed leader." Many of the points made by Mr. Jones provide a compelling assessment of the complex relationship between the White House and the CIA. However, regarding Mr. Jones attempts to portray Mr Bush as a victim of CIA incompetence has proven to only be partially right because Mr. Jones fails to mention the extent that Vice President Cheney played in shaping CIA intelligence and consequently priming U.S. public opinion for war with Iraq.

Removing Stones from a Long Standing Stonewall

An editorial in the New York Times opines that: "True to its mania for secrecy, the Bush administration is leaving behind vast gaps in the most sensitive White House e-mail records, and with lawyers and public interest groups in hot pursuit of information that deserves to be part of the permanent historical record. E-mail messages that have gone suspiciously missing are estimated to number in the millions. These could illuminate some of the administration’s darker moments, including the lead-up to the Iraq war, when intelligence was distorted, the destruction of videotapes of C.I.A. torture interrogations, and the vindictive outing of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame Wilson." The missing gaps in "... history also includes improper business conducted by more than 50 White House appointees via e-mail at the Republican Party headquarters." Our first line of defense against such inappropriate attempts to hoodwink the American people that everything just went poof! are the historians and archivists who requested the emails some time ago and found their efforts unanswered and then told 'geez we lost everything.' Such juvenile excuses don't cut it with tech- savvy investigators. E-mails leave plenty of electronic traces behind on the many servers they pass through that are easily traceable and are then easy to reassemble into their original context. But it seems the Bushies were didn't really play by the rules; they never intended their e-mails to be seen by the public. They used private servers that belonged to the RNC; a highly inappropriate practice that openly suggests Bush's true intent to privatize his records. As the matter has played out and provided some interesting information has surfaced through the diligent work of "(h)istorians and archivists (who) are suing the administration. We should be grateful for their efforts. Entire days of e-mail records have turned up conveniently blank at the offices of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney." It is Cheney who continues the battle against the release of the rest of the e-mails; "he is fighting to the last the transfer of his records to the National Archives, as required by law. He recently argued in court that he “alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records.” As in: L’etat c’est Dick" (The state it is Dick). Both Reagan and Clinton tried to avoid making some records public. "But the Bush team, from day one, has flouted the requirement to preserve a truthful record, ignoring repeated warnings from the National Archives. In government agencies, the public’s freedom-of-information rights have been maliciously hobbled." The National Archives also faces a significant challenge in the shear growth of electronic information since Clinton that is now associated with the Bush Administration. "It will take years to ingest before historians can truly get a handle on what is missing." Bush has covered his electronic tracks that suggest felonious intent. The Times concludes by expressing it's hope for change; that: "President-elect Barack Obama must quickly undo the damage by ordering that records be shielded from political interference, by repairing the freedom-of-information process, and by ending the abuse of the classification process to cloak the truths of the presidency."