Problems at the CIA Will Continue

Spencer Ackerman of The New Republic has an article on the problems at the CIA. It's seems to me the problem with the CIA is not what George Tenet or Porter Goss did; it's what George W. Bush has done and is continuing to do. Here are the two key paragraphs:

Goss's bon voyage revealed an essential truth about his turbulent 19 months as CIA director. Though he was sent to clean up Tenet's mess, he ended up falling victim to the same trap Tenet did: being unable to serve President Bush while faithfully leading the CIA. Tenet's approach was to appease Bush where it mattered (Iraq, most notably) in order to preserve the CIA's tenuous bureaucratic position. Goss's approach was to act as Bush's enforcer while calling it reform. In the end, Goss couldn't satisfy Bush and he had no allies left in the agency he ostensibly led. If General Mike Hayden--whom Bush is expected to nominate today as Goss's replacement--is to do better, he'll have to find a way to solve a problem that has now destroyed the last two CIA directors.

(snip)

With Hayden, the White House has a loyalist as a leading candidate to replace Goss, as he proved earlier this year with his vigorous public defenses of Bush's warrantless surveillance program at NSA. But Goss's calamitous tenure proves that loyalty to Bush, even at the expense of the distrusted CIA, isn't enough. Whoever leads the agency will also have to contend with institutional bureaucratic rivalries that have left the CIA in a suspended state of eclipse. Hayden, as Negroponte's man, may preside over one solution--one that Tenet found agonizing and that Goss never quite was prepared to choose. That's the outright dismemberment of the CIA, whereby Langley becomes more of an exclusively human-intelligence shop and analytical functions go to the new issue-driven centers like those set up for terrorism and nonproliferation, and where Negroponte's Office of the Director of National Intelligence is unchallenged....

Negroponte won't be the only one unchallenged. Cheney and Rumsfeld will henceforth be free to shape intelligience and operations in secrecy without contradiction. That increases the likelihood that intelligience will be politicized for a right wing ideological agenda. That is not good for America. Republicans and Democrats in Congress had better think long and hard about a process whereby the president has used the CIA as a scapegoat for his own policy failures and misconduct, thereby weakening American intelligience and our ability to act effectively in the world.