The Yes-Man:Bush sent Porter Goss to the CIA...is wrecking it.

[Algorem]

The Yes-Man
President Bush sent Porter Goss to the CIA to keep the agency in line. What he’s really doing is wrecking it.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10472

By Robert Dreyfuss
Issue Date: 11.23.05

Exactly as intended, Porter Goss has hit the Central Intelligence Agency like a wrecking ball.

The former Florida congressman, who had an undistinguished career as a CIA operations officer in the 1960s, came to the agency in September 2004 after serving seven years as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. With his staff in tow -- a collection of Capitol Hill aides nicknamed “the Gosslings” -- Goss bowled into the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters, scattering senior officials like so many duckpins. In mid-September, Robert Richer, the newly installed deputy director of operations and a former Near East Division chief, quit in disgust. The newspapers duly reported Richer’s departure. But he is only the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg.

Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others, unable to retire, have stayed, but only to mark time at the agency. Morale, already low after several years during which the CIA was accused of a series of intelligence failures related to September 11 and Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, is now at rock-bottom. The agency’s vaunted Near East Division, in particular, which served as the “pointy end of the spear,” as one CIA veteran put it, in simultaneous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “global war on terror,” has been decimated.

And the agency has been locked down tight: After a decade during which the CIA prided itself on a new openness, shedding some of its legendary obsession with secrecy, neither Goss nor anyone else in the organization is giving interviews or bothering to explain the CIA’s workings...

[Metta]

1. More short sighted, water carrying. They want obeisance not intelligence.

That's been obvious since day one. When the task gets lost, people get hurt. That's obvious,too.

[zoeb]

2. Goss is just another Brownie

doing a "heck of a job." This nation is so screwed.

[tanyev]

3. Wow. Excellent article.

[applegrove]

4. Porter is likely doing exactly the job they want him to do. All CIA

experienced operatives & managers with any integrity will be disgusted and leave.

They diminish every where they go. Cause they hate governance.

[IndyOp]

5. Their wrecking the CIA is our nightmare and our dream...

Our nightmare because with their secrecy; by pushing out any/all competent people they are able to plan and carry out operations that put us all in danger.

Our dream because, as they anger and fire competent agents, those agents are free to turn against them and 'make things happen' behind the scenes. A friend has assured me that Watergate happened because CIA agents wanted it to.

:kick:

[Cha]

7. And, Traitorgate is happening..

because CIA agents want it to?

[IndyOp]

8. Nixon's Deepthroat, Mark Felt, was FBI --

People who know and keep secrets for a living, have power. They can tell what they know. They did not make Watergate happen, nor are they making Traitorgate happen. Without people on the inside turning and telling we would be nowhere -- we need CIA; FBI; Libby's Aides; Powell's Assistant; all of the people who have been dismissed from or quit their jobs because of * --- all of them!

:kick:

[Cha]

6. I was so worried about

goss getting in and people said.."Don't worry, Kerry will win and he'll be sent packing"..well, guess what?