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shawa
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Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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 Posted: Fri May 12, 2006 1:09 pm Post subject: Opinion Journal-Wonder Land |
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Opinion Journal
| Quote: | Wonder Land
This Isn't Just 'Dissent'
The CIA's leakers lack the Cold Warriors' sense of purpose.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, May 12, 2006 12:01 a.m.
In the same week that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent his antic epistle to President Bush ("I have no doubt that telling lies is reprehensible in any culture"), a House subcommittee released a report on the U.S.'s public diplomacy efforts around the Islamic world titled "State Department Efforts to Engage Muslim Audiences Lack Certain Communications Elements and Face Significant Challenges." That's an understatement.
Among the "significant challenges" to getting a coherent U.S. message out to the Arab world, one might include the odd recent habit of employees at the CIA to leak to the press key elements of the government's war on Islamic terror. What conclusion do you think might be reached by an 18-year-old Yemeni reading online the details of these leaks about U.S. officials "confirming" wiretaps and secret terrorist prisons? He might reasonably conclude that major parts of the American government don't want to wage a war on terror and think the war is merely the obsession of the country's president.
This conclusion found its way into Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "diplomatic" letter to President Bush. "European investigators have confirmed the existence of secret prisons in Europe," Iran's president wrote. "I could not correlate the abduction of a person, and him or her being kept in secret prisons, with the provisions of any judicial system." Any reason to believe this also doesn't correlate with the views of whoever in the CIA leaked the prisons' existence?
We used to live in simpler times. From 1950 to 1991, America's enemy took the form of a country with hundreds of ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads aimed at the U.S. mainland, and a global espionage force called the KGB with a single address, Moscow. This was the Cold War, and in those days the U.S. intelligence community had a common worldview. That ideology was laid out in the now-famous National Security Council document 68, delivered in April 1950 to President Harry Truman. The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb the previous August.
NSC-68's first page--"Background of the Current Crisis"--describes a Soviet Union that is "animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." NSC-68's chapter headings were not about mere policy but the basics, describing "The Fundamental Purpose of the United States" and "The Underlying Conflict in the Realm of Ideas and Values Between the U.S. Purpose and the Kremlin Design."
Who could disagree? Well, many did--ceaselessly outside the government, mostly in academic centers and policy journals. It was a lively, titanic debate. But not inside the government, or at least nothing that compares to what has been leaking out about the war on terror. The most serious bureaucratic disputes within the government's Cold War intelligence agencies involved disagreements over arms-reduction proposals in the SALT talks and the like. But there was no serious disagreement with the ideology or threat described in NSC-68.
Occasionally some in the West's intelligence services who couldn't abide this ideology (or decided to cash out) simply defected; they went over to the other side. In the mid-1970s the anti-Vietnam Democratic left of the Senate Church Committee hearings popularized the notion that the CIA was itself a kind of evil empire. Still, containing Soviet communism remained the animating idea inside the national security bureaucracies until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Today we have neither institutional discipline nor a shared ideology. The foundational U.S. document in the war on terror is the June 2002 Bush Doctrine, a response to September 11. But here the threat itself is debated endlessly. Islamic terror has no address. Obviously swaths of the national security bureaucracy--the Pillars, Wilsons and McCarthys--not only don't buy into the Bush Doctrine but feel obliged to take their disagreements with it outside the government. Since Vietnam, a war as in Iraq is no longer a national commitment but a policy matter.
As a result, the security bureaucracies have become a confused tangle of oppositional ideas over the war in Iraq, discrete policies such as the warrantless wiretaps, and the nature of the threat from Islamic terror. Out of this confusion of policy and purpose have fallen leaks as sensitive as the al Qaeda secret prisons and as oh-golly-gee as yesterday's "leak" about the government analyzing billions of phone-call patterns to pick up terrorist activity.
Aldrich Ames was a CIA traitor. Is this treason? I don't think so. But it may be a prosecutable crime under the terms of the Espionage Act. It certainly doesn't qualify as simple dissent, which seems to be the view in elite press circles. Using a privileged, confidential position inside an intelligence agency to blow up a U.S. government's war policy isn't "dissent." It's something else.
Disagreements at this stage of the terror war are inevitable. But the one thing that can erode and destroy any public bureaucracy, whether it is the CIA fighting Islamic terror or a FEMA fighting hurricanes, is the loss of a shared, defined institutional mission.
If the Defense Department under its intelligence secretary, Stephen Cambone, is expanding its role in this area, it is in part because Defense at least has a shared internal view of the antiterror mission. You may disagree with that view, but it achieves the first requirement of enabling a bureaucracy to function. At the CIA, the line between legitimate and illegitimate policy dissent seems a matter of personal preference.
If confirmed, Gen. Michael Hayden's biggest problem at the CIA will be that some of his employees are the products of a culture that no longer understands or respects the sense of purpose, discipline and honor of the best Cold Warriors, who understood that the government is an elected hierarchy of constitutional responsibility and not a faculty senate free to undermine mere presidents. He will have to make clear that any official who finds internal dissent procedures inadequate to his or her "moral obligation" to overturn strategic doctrine, affect election outcomes or destroy an intelligence operation should get out or be willing to risk criminal prosecution. And it would help this country's sense of purpose if he made that clear not only to the CIA but in public to the American people.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. |
President Bush carries a heavy burden to keep America safe from attack.
I am sure this burden is on his mind every waking moment of his day (and probably through the night as well).
My prayers are with him.
We face a MANIACAL enemy.
But there are those within our government and press who let their Bush-hatred outweigh the reality of the enemy we face. I personally feel that some would welcome another attack on our country just so they could blame Bush. IMO, these leakers and presstitutes should be strung up!
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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Me#1You#10
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Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
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| Posted: Fri May 12, 2006 3:25 pm Post subject: |
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Excellent article, but he appears to stop short of the logic of his argument... (emphasis mine)
| Quote: | | He (Hayden) will have to make clear that any official who finds internal dissent procedures inadequate to his or her "moral obligation" to overturn strategic doctrine, affect election outcomes or destroy an intelligence operation should get out or be willing to risk criminal prosecution. |
Choice "A" just ain't gonna happen as it's predicated upon the spurious notion of some shared "moral equation" that working WITHIN the system to effect change rests on some higher moral plane. In fact, quite the obverse is now promulgated and celebrated among it's ideological base and remains unchallenged in it's practice. Is there ANY reason to believe that those who would reject the underlying premise would voluntarily sacrifice a lifetime career investment and all that it entails?
Nor will choice "B", a threat of prosecution (or perhaps even actual prosecution, conviction and incarceration, a LONG shot in itself given government's demonstrated reticence to prosecute) do anything to dissuade targeted ideologues both inside and outside the CIA. Instead (and more likely), it would further harden ideological positions, alienate and demoralize untargeted elements of the bureaucracy, and, perhaps, even invigorate the opposition outside the CIA.
The culmination of his argument seems clear, though he doesn't address it. Assuming the failure of a Hayden initiative suggested above, what we are left with is dissolution of the CIA as an independent governmental organization and it's total absorption into DOD. Would that be a bad thing? |
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Wing Wiper
Rear Admiral
Joined: 09 Aug 2004
Posts: 664
Location: Oregon
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| Posted: Fri May 12, 2006 3:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | what we are left with is dissolution of the CIA as an independent governmental organization and it's total absorption into DOD. Would that be a bad thing? |
Given the history of the U.S. military, no. They have consistantly held themselves to a higher standard of protecting the Constitution than any other portion of the United States government. |
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