Congresswoman Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, recently called the U.S. intelligence system under the Bush administration "a mess." Do you agree with that, and with her call for a major overhaul?
There are some real deep-seated problems throughout the intelligence community. They're not caused by any one thing, but one thing I'm certain of is that it's not a matter of not having enough resources, or not being large enough. In fact, in some aspects the intelligence community is too large and has too many agencies which are duplicating functions. So there is clearly a need for reorganization and refocusing.
Accountability is also a problem within these huge bureaucracies. Here's one quick example: The individual at CIA who was blamed for the wrong targeting information that led to the attack on the Chinese embassy in the former Yugoslav Republic several years back [NATO air strikes mistakenly hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999], was actually the same person who raised concerns that the targeting information was wrong. But that analyst's senior managers ignored him.
How much of that kind of problem is due to political pressure, either back then or now?
Political pressures have always been there and will always be there. The key is for the intelligence agencies to maintain a focus on what their mission is, which is not to be politically popular downtown, but to be an honest broker. Being an honest broker means you have to bring bad news to the powerful.
Has the Bush White House created a political environment where intelligence officers can no longer do that at all?
Well, they're doing what others have done. But it's as bad in this administration as it was probably during the Johnson administration, where you had pressures to shade intelligence, to misrepresent intelligence. An overall politicization of it, with an agenda for going to war.
In addition, you have now what appear on the surface to be some huge, huge intelligence failures, and it's not clear where those failures originated.
What are you hearing from your colleagues still active in the intelligence community now in terms of morale and their ability to do their jobs?
The morale is not good. There are a lot of people expressing a lot of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. But meanwhile, when you've got kids who are about to go to college ... who wants to put their job at risk by confronting the situation?
There has to be better accountability. You have to have an agency that has enough independence, and yet enough internal self-control, where they reward excellence and punish mediocrity. The CIA has tended to reward mediocrity, and at the same time bow to White House pressure and not take a strong enough stand. But look, this is nothing new. There's always going to be political pressure on the intelligence system; it's happened under Republican and Democratic administrations alike.
But why does the intelligence community appear increasingly to be in open revolt against the White House? If the political pressures are nothing new, why the unprecedented degree of protest?
Put it this way, with this White House, I see an outright pattern of bullying: Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, warned that the U.S. was going to need several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, and he's attacked for that, and basically told that he doesn't know what he's talking about -- and he's fired essentially a year before he's out of that job. When it's time for him to retire, not a single senior representative of the Department of Defense or White House leadership is there for his retirement. Then there was Thomas White, the secretary of the Army who was forced out. There was a senior CIA analyst by the name of Fulton Armstrong who was attacked, using leaks to the press, which alleged that he was disloyal and somehow under the influence of the Cuban government. There was a prosecutor [ousted from] the Department of Justice who had warned that John Walker Lindh's father had hired a lawyer and that [the DOJ] needed to consider the Miranda rights.
So what we've seen is a repeated pattern across different agencies, all with the apparent sanction of the White House, of going after anybody who's a critic, or who's seen as not being in tune with the administration's message. When people raise legitimate issues that may not be consistent with existing policy, instead of conducting a fair intellectual assessment of those issues, those people are attacked and their character is impugned.
Recent polls show that Bush has strong public support on the issue of national security; it will undoubtedly be a major theme of his reelection campaign. How do you currently rate the president's national security policy?
They talk it up well, but their actions are very inconsistent. In spite of that, I do think that overall we're in a better security situation now than before 9/11. But look, they've allowed the outing of a clandestine CIA operative to go unpunished. That affects the ability to collect human intelligence, which is crucial.
And they still haven't solved the problem of who's in charge of security. You have the FBI doing its thing, and the CIA, and now we've got this huge Department of Homeland Security. But one question we ought to be asking is, who's in charge of finding Osama bin Laden? If everybody's in charge, that means nobody's in charge.
I think there's still a big problem with a lack of coordination and sharing of information. Failures to effectively use our existing intelligence resources -- failures which evidently existed before 9/11 -- have reemerged. And now decisions are being made with an eye toward the politics of the election, and not on what actually needs to be done.
Moreover, the war on Iraq was a complete diversion from the war on terrorism. The Bush administration continues to tout that it was central to the war on terrorism, but that's just flat out wrong. They can keep saying that, they can keep claiming every day that the moon is made of green cheese, but just saying it doesn't make it true. The fact of the matter is, the terrorist threat we face, the one that causes the greatest danger to U.S. citizens, is from Muslim extremists. Up until we invaded, Iraq remained one of the most secular countries in the Middle East. We've now managed to take that country and set it on a road that could easily lead toward Muslim extremism.
If that's a success in the war on terrorism, I don't get it.
About the writer
Mark Follman is assistant news editor at Salon.
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