Rumsfeld's power grab from
CIA is a threat
The Star Ledger
Opinion
John Farmer
Monday, January 24, 2005
President Bush's inaugural pledge to make the world safe for
democratic diversity has obscured his quiet campaign to do just
the reverse in Washington -- to consolidate essential functions
of the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency into
Donald Rumsfeld's hydra-headed and increasingly powerful
Pentagon. And to bypass Congress in the process.
Thanks to some acute reporting in the New Yorker magazine and
the Washington Post, we learn that the Bush-Cheney crew has set
up shops in the Pentagon that will take over some covert
functions from the CIA as well as much of its
intelligence-gathering operation. Something labeled innocently
enough the "Strategic Support Branch" is supposed to provide
Rumsfeld the intelligence he believes the CIA has to failed to
produce.
Rumsfeld reportedly even plans to set up his own training camp
for spooks, paralleling the CIA's own espionage school. He thinks
big.
The Pentagon has long been in the intelligence trade; it
oversees most of the estimated $30billion-plus intelligence
budget. But, until now, its interest has been primarily order of
battle intelligence -- the troop strength, morale, weaponry,
intentions and logistical capacity of potential enemies and even
of some friends. But Rumsfeld is reaching for far more -- nothing
less than the replacement or emasculation of the CIA as the
primary intelligence service in the fight against terrorism, with
its political as well as military implications.
So far, nothing has been heard from Congress about Rumsfeld's
power grab. And that's a serious oversight. For what's involved
here is an attempt by the Bush administration to escape the legal
requirement that Congress be kept informed of clandestine and
covert (the deniable kind) operations. But shifting them (along
with intelligence gathering) to the Pentagon -- in effect, giving
them a military justification and cover -- makes the
congressional notification requirement less clear, maybe even
irrelevant.
Bush wants a free hand to fight terrorism. No quibbling by
Congress; equally important, no interference by the new national
intelligence director created by the intelligence reform act
resulting from Tom Kean's 9/11 commission. The Pentagon and
Rumsfeld are Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney's instruments in
a blatant bid to end-run Congress and the CIA.
The installation of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state
will complete the consolidation of the military, intelligence and
diplomatic power in Washington into the speaks-with-one-voice
instrument the Bush-Cheney team wants.
Rice is able and articulate but is essentially a staff
functionary. She is an extension of Bush-Cheney thinking, not a
source of competing ideas. Without a national following of her
own, she's not likely to prove much of a match for Rumsfeld, one
of Washington's most ferocious turf fighters, even in matters of
foreign policy.
The military, despite its oft-stated deference to civilian
authority, has long hankered for a role in shaping foreign
policy. In fact, it maintains global area bureaucracies -- like
its Near East and South Asia desk -- parallel to those of the
State Department. (In my day in Washington, the Pentagon's area
desk officers seemed sharper and more in tune with world reality
than their counterparts at State.) The Army has a long record of
running post-war civil administration operations, as it did in
Vietnam, with less than happy results.
In truth, there's much to criticize about the CIA's recent
record -- its lack of human intelligence assets and enough
trained linguists, its failure to track alQaeda prior to 9/11 or
to grasp that Saddam Hussein, instead of bristling with weapons
of mass destruction, was a pussy cat. And the State Department
hasn't been much better. As a source of competing ideas, it has
been largely ineffective, in part because of Cheney's hostility
to Colin Powell.
But the independence of the State Department and the CIA --
and their freedom to inform Congress -- is critical to the proper
functioning of the American government and to an adequately
informed electorate. And that is precisely what Bush and Cheney
and Rumsfeld would undermine.
Forty-five years ago, Dwight Eisenhower, in the prescient
moment of his presidency, warned about the dangers of the
military-industrial complex to American democracy. Bush's
proposed military-political-intelligence complex looms as an even
greater menace.
John Farmer is The Star-Ledger's national political
correspondent.
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