President Bush chose Porter Goss to lead the CIA

[Disturbed]

By Terence Hunt
ASSOCIATED PRESS
1:40 p.m. August 10, 2004



Associated Press
President Bush speaks in the Rose Garden, along with Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., left, after he picked Goss, head of the House intelligence committee, to be the new director of the CIA.

WASHINGTON – President Bush chose Porter Goss, a Republican congressman and onetime spy, on Tuesday to lead the CIA as the troubled agency struggles to repair its tarnished reputation, confront new terror threats and face the uncertainty of a massive intelligence reorganization.

"He knows the CIA inside and out," Bush said of Goss, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who served as a clandestine CIA officer during the 1960s in Central America and Western Europe before making a fortune in Florida real estate and the newspaper business. "He's the right man to lead this important agency at this critical moment in our nation's history."

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Twelve weeks before the presidential election, senior Democrats complained Bush had turned to a partisan politician to fill what nominally is a nonpolitical position. Bush also was accused of trying to change the subject on a day when more than 100 House Democrats urged the president to call a special session of Congress to deal with intelligence changes proposed by the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/terror/20040810-1340-bush-cia.html

* It is hoped that the Dems will have the spines to overwhelmingly vote no on Goss.

[Disturbed]

1. Cheney's Cat's Paw

Cheney's Cat's Paw
Porter Goss as CIA Director?

By RAY McGOVERN
Former CIA Analyst

There is, thankfully, a remnant of CIA professionals who still put objective analysis above political correctness and career advancement. Just when they thought there were no indignities left for them to suffer, they are shuddering again at press reports that Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL) may soon be their new boss.

That possibility conjures up a painful flashback for those of us who served as CIA analysts when Richard Nixon was president. Chalk it up to our naivetA(C), but we were taken aback when swashbuckling James Schlesinger, who followed Richard Helms as CIA director, announced on arrival, "I am here to see that you guys don't screw Richard Nixon!" To underscore his point, Schlesinger told us he would be reporting directly to White House political adviser Bob Haldeman (Nixon's Karl Rove) and not to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.
No doubt Goss would be more discreet in showing his hand, but his appointment as director would be the ultimate in politicization. He has long shown himself to be under the spell of Vice President Dick Cheney, and would likely report primarily to him and to White House political adviser Karl Rove rather than to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Goss would almost certainly follow lame-duck director George Tenet's practice of reading to the president in the morning and become an integral part of the "White House team." The team-membership phenomenon is particularly disquieting.
If the failure-prone experience of the past few years has told us anything, it is that being a "team member" in good standing is the kiss of death for the CIA director's primary role of "telling it like it is" to the president and his senior advisers. It was a painful moment of truth when former Speaker Newt Gingricha*"like Cheney, a frequent visitor to CIA headquartersa*"told the press that Tenet was "so grateful to the president that he would do anything for him."

http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern07062004.html

[Cha]

2. Goss is from Florida, too. Me thinks that has something

to do with it.

[readmylips]

3. Picked controversial guy...use as divide and conquer....

this way little bushie doesn't have to talk about his destruction of our country. I want democrats not to speak badly about the guy and confirm him ASAP...have Kerry fire him ASAP.

[Moderator]

4. duplicate

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=739904