The Name of the Game is Hegemon

In two interesting reads over the last couple of days, Steve Clemons has posted the idea that

...The reason Negroponte wants Michael Hayden is to check the Pentagon's colonization of the national intelligence bureaucracy. To do that, Negroponte wants a loyal player who knows how the military dimensions of the national intelligence establishment is structured and what Rumsfeld's imperious intentions are...

The balls to keep the eye on are DONALD RUMSFELD and the religious crusading defense spy chief, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Lt. General WILLIAM BOYKIN.

Hastert and his colleagues need to wake up, study the gaming going on, and understand that while they may not like Hayden -- something needs to be done to balance the deck between Negroponte and Rumsfeld.

I think it's smart to have General Hayden in place to shut down General Boykin and his team.

That's a bit like making a choice between Godzilla and Mechgodzilla, isn't it?

Boykin's dangerous. But then, all of these people are. They can jockey against each other, circle their wagons, and launch their missiles against Iran all at the same time.

Okay: Dear Leader can't, but he's a figurehead, and even he knows it.

The name of the game is Hegemon, and more than one neocon Trotsky will go down before the real deal Stalin moves into town.

[An interesting aside: Boykin, like Oliver North, of Iran-Contra fame, was involved in the abortive Iranian hostage rescue attempts that failed during Carter's administration.

This resulted in the Reagan- Poppy Bu$h administration (with young Cheneyburton and Darth Rumsfeld on the bridge), and resulted in the Iranian release of the hostages within 20 minutes of the Reagan inauguration...]

Larry C. Johnson has been following the unraveling of the CIA, presumably since he left (overt) government service shortly after Bill Clinton's $election. His opinion?

If the New York Times is correct, John Negroponte and Michael Hayden are hell bent on shifting critical analytical functions from the CIA to some other part of government (perhaps a stand-alone entity). If true, the death knell for the CIA is sounding, and an important national security capability will disappear if they are permitted to institute this madness. While right-wing crazies, convinced that the CIA is part of an elaborate plot to undermine the Bush administration, will celebrate this pyrrhic victory, sane Americans should hit the panic button...

These changes are being justified based on false conventional wisdom - namely, that the structure and organization of the CIA was the major reason for the failure to stop the 9-11 plot. I am not arguing that everything at the CIA is hunky dory and that reforms are not required. To the contrary, I believe the CIA has become a big, lumbering, broken bureaucracy.

But, for all of the faults and flaws, the CIA is still a remarkable organization capable of amazing things. If you doubt that, simply buy Gary Berntsen's book, Jawbreaker, which recounts the lead role the CIA played in ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan and tracking Bin Laden. Fortunately, the good work by Gary and other CIA officers was not an isolated case. However, the American public will not know most of the stories.

The Bush administration, the Republican Congress, and key members of the media also have pushed the lie that it was bad intelligence analysis that led the United States into the war with Iraq. The truth of the matter is quite the opposite. While there were some CIA analysts guilty of bad analysis (e.g., one senior analyst insisted that aluminum tubes in Iraq were evidence of a revived nuclear program), analysts were right on many more issues. The analysts dismissed the Bush administration's claims that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in West Africa and they debunked the White House and DOD insistence that Bin Laden and Saddam were in cahoots. Yet, despite clear, unambiguous analytical judgments to the contrary, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice warned the American people of imminent mushroom clouds, implied that Iraq was tied to the 9-11 attacks, and whipped the American public into a frenzy to back the invasion of Iraq.

The sad irony to all of this is that it is the CIA, not the Bush administration, that has been punished for being right...

Of course the CIA's problems were not created only by cowardly politicians; the agency has suffered from a failure of leadership. George Tenet, in my view, bears special responsibility for helping undermine its credibility...

When it is doing its job right, the CIA, especially the analysts, will be a natural target of criticism by politicians. Politicians vested in a particular policy want to hear good news. They do not like being told that their "great idea" is actually a turd. That happened under the Democrat Lyndon Johnson, the Republican Richard Nixon, the Democrat Jimmy Carter, the Republican Ronald Reagan, the Democrat Bill Clinton, and the Republican George W. Bush.

Unfortunately, Bush, Cheney, and many of their partisans believe the CIA has it in for the president and are not being coy about treating the CIA as an enemy that must be contained...

The current moves by Negroponte and Hayden, if true, to move the analytical function out of the CIA is crazy and demonstrates a woeful ignorance of the history of the intelligence community...

If I could make two changes to the CIA, I would do the following. First, release to the public the Inspector General's report that assigned blame for who did not do their job in the leadup to 9-11. That should be publicly debated, and there should be an accounting. Just as Navy Captains at the helms of ships that run aground lose their jobs, so too should intelligence officers be held responsible for deliberate sins of omission and commission. Second, CIA should institute a system of management akin to the military's, which forces a periodic evaluation of officers. As in the military, low performers should be weeded out and released. The real problem at the CIA has been the lack of accountability and the lack of consistent, strong leadership.

Sounds about right.

There may be rivalry among the Hegemon wanna-bees, but again Johnson's got it right, there are too many tentacles of the Foggo-Wilkes beast entwined in the CIA. One wonders whether they're also in the DIA and the DHS, but if Chancellor Rumsfeld or Black Spot told anyone, they'd have to kill them.

There are more letters of the alphabet in this game, and factions even within them, as Noah Shachtman points out:

...NSA whistleblower Russ Tice, to put it mildly, hates Hayden's guts. Echoing TPM Muckraker allegations that "between 1999 and 2005, the NSA bungled two key technology programs and... has been burning through billions -- billions -- of dollars," Tice tells Defense Tech:

"Through his mismanagement, many critical SIGINT missions were not funded and the intelligence needed and depended on was not collected. Perhaps 911 could have been avoided if NSA had those assets in place and did not waste all that money...

"He lied about the NSA being involved in domestic spying and continues to lie about the enormous scope of those programs. He stated NSAer know about the Forth Amendment to the Constitution and in the same breath proved that he did not have a clue about it hinging on "probable cause" not reasonableness. He forgot to mention that he also violated the FISA Act and NSA's own policy on domestic Spying (USSID-18).

"To be frank, he is a self promoter, an ass-kisser, an accomplished liar, an oath breaker, an extremely poor manager, a sadist, a criminal, and a proven domestic enemy of the Constitution of the United States. Oh, and a piss-poor all-source intelligence officer to boot. He should have remained an air opps officer restricted to the flight ready-room.

"To sum Hayden up in a few words, he is dishonorable and without integrity..."

Now, don't mince your words.