Goss Is Wrong for the CIA

[depakid]

In a recent posting at www.davidcorn.com, I noted one big strike against Representative Porter Goss, whom George W. Bush has nominated to be CIA chief. Last year when the House intelligence committee, which he chaired, critiqued the prewar intelligence on Iraq, Goss, a Republican, joined Representative Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the panel, in blasting the collection efforts of the intelligence community. But Goss, disagreeing with Harman, would not go so far as to assail the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq produced by the CIA and other intelligence agencies in October 2002. This NIE had errantly claimed that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and a reconstituted nuclear weapons program (and Bush subsequently overstated the overstatements of the NIE). Goss's reluctance to denounce the NIE stands in sharp contrast to the recent Senate intelligence committee report, which harshly concluded that "most of the major key judgments" in the NIE "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting. A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence."

Goss's unwillingness to criticize one of the most flawed NIEs in the history of the US intelligence community is troubling. And as one of the key intelligence policymakers of the last decade, he shares the blame for the recent failures of the CIA and the other intelligence agencies. But also troubling is his partisan record. Several times in recent months he has attacked Senator John Kerry's record on national security. For instance, he co-wrote an op-ed titled "Need Intelligence? Don't Ask John Kerry." It is certainly no big deal for sitting GOP member of the House to throw brickbats at the Democratic presidential nominee. But it seems as if Goss has allowed partisan concerns to interfere with his obligations as one of the few legislators who oversee the intelligence world for the rest of us. He blocked a House investigation into the embarrassing prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. He also said no to an investigation of the dealings between the Bush administration and Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who has been accused of leaking US secrets to Iran and whose Iraqi National Congress provided false information about Iraq's WMDs. "I would say," Goss remarked, "that the oversight has worked well in matters relating to Mr. Chalabi."

These decisions indicate Goss is sometimes willing to put partisan needs ahead of national security obligations. And the best evidence to back up that charge is an interview he granted to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune last October. The subject was the administration leak that identified the wife of former ambassador Joe Wilson as a CIA officer. Goss dismissed the Wilson affair as mainly a political matter that did not warrant the attention of his intelligence committee. "I would say there's a much larger dose of partisan politics going on right now than there is worry about national security," he told the newspaper. And he characterized the leak as "inadvertent."

But at this point, he had no evidence to back up his claim that the leak had been accidental. The leak--which was published in the July 14 column of Robert Novak--harmed the career and operations of Valerie Wilson (aka Valerie Plame), who worked in the important field of weapons counterproliferation. That is, the leak, to an unknown degree, undermined CIA efforts to track and block the movement of weapons of mass destruction and WMD-related materials.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0812-06.htm

Simply unbelieveable that 12 Democratic senators want to give this guy a pass....