April 20, 2006
Fault Lines
Via Laura Rozen, Harper's has a very interesting (even if it engages in some rather incendiary metaphors) article on splits at the CIA:
With the war in Iraq an utter debacle and public opinion turned against the White House, anger within the armed forces towards Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Administration is growing, and the Pentagon is fighting back (see “Pentagon Memo Aims to Counter Rumsfeld Critics” in the April 16 New York Times). But what's been little noted thus far is what looks to be a similar revolt brewing at the CIA. An ex-senior agency officer who keeps in contact with his former peers told me that there is a “a big swing” in anti-Bush sentiment at Langley. “I've been stunned by what I'm hearing,” he said. “There are people who fear that indictments and subpoenas could be coming down, and they don't want to get caught up in it.”This former senior officer said there “seems to be a quiet conspiracy by rational people” at the agency to avoid involvement in some of the particularly nasty tactics being employed by the administration, especially “renditions”—the practice whereby the CIA sends terrorist suspects abroad to be questioned in Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan, and other nations where the regimes are not squeamish about torturing detainees. My source, hardly a softie on the topic of terrorism, said of the split at the CIA: “There's an SS group within the agency that's willing to do anything and there's a Wehrmacht group that is saying, 'I'm not gonna touch this stuff'.”
Why's that? Scott Horton, explains
“When the shit hits the fan,” he explained, “the administration scapegoats lower-level people. It doesn't do a lot in terms of inspiring confidence.”
I've been very curious about the situation within the intelligence community following the post-9/11 Commission shake-up. The HUMINT services have been fairly radically rearranged, and a good deal of turf-war played out, all mostly out of view of the public. Bringing in Porter Goss resulted in a bit of a "purge-and-binge" in the CIA hierarchy, and what results that has had are unclear. I've been operating under the assumption that the agency had been somewhat politically lobotomized in that process, the same way other departments have been in the past. But I know there are still a lot of great people working there in important positions.
All very curious.
Posted by ben at April 20, 2006 09:51 AM
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