Bush's CIA takeover--Boston Globe Editorial

[Demeter]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2006/05/09/bushs_cia_takeover/

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A CIA director should be someone who will obey the law, will not turn the powers of his foreign intelligence agency on Americans, and will resist any temptation to tailor the intelligence ''product" to suit the policy preferences of a president, a powerful vice president, or any other policy maker.

Integrity in the leader of the CIA means, above all, having the backbone to resist pressure from the White House to politicize intelligence. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are not the only occupants of the White House who have wanted the CIA director to produce intelligence that suit their policy intentions. But they have taken the practice to an extreme.

Indeed, the CIA's reduced role in the past couple of years is traceable less to any failure to foresee Sept. 11 than to the enmity of neoconservatives who have long resented the refusal of agency analysts to verify the neoconservatives' notions about an active nuclear weapons program in Saddam Hussein's Iraq or operational collaboration between Hussein and Al Qaeda. Because of that resentment, many CIA veterans have been nudged into retirement and the president's crucial daily intelligence briefing is no longer given to him by the CIA director but by the national intelligence director, John Negroponte.

Bush has now nominated Negroponte's deputy director of national intelligence to run the CIA. The Senate must not let the agency, which has already lost its roles as chief provider of analysis and coordinator of cooperation with foreign intelligence services, also lose its very independence. The new CIA director should be independent of policy makers who want their intelligence cut to suit the fashion of the day, but must not be independent of laws passed by Congress.

[genieroze]

1. Creepy.