Jack Kelly Sunday

A little late. Sorry.

Jack Kelly takes on Leon Panetta in this week's column.

He doesn't like Panetta as CIA head:

There are, I suspect, quite a few jobs in government for which having no experience is not a liability. But few would list director of central intelligence among them. Which is why Barack Obama's pick of Leon Panetta is causing so much consternation.

A former congressman, Mr. Panetta, 70, served as budget director and then as chief of staff in the Clinton administration. But he's never spent a day serving in the intelligence community.

Then, a little historical revisionism regarding John Brennan:

Mr. Obama originally had planned to tap John Brennan, who was head of the National Counterterrorism Center at the time of his retirement in 2005. But the rumored appointment ignited a storm of protest from left-wingers who opposed the coercive interrogation techniques the CIA used on some high- level al-Qaida prisoners.

"The fact that I was not involved in the decision-making process for any of these controversial policies and actions has been ignored," Mr. Brennan said in a Nov. 26 letter withdrawing his name.

As with most things Jack reports, reality is a bit different. Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan:

[The Atlantic] reports the Republican, former chief-of-staff for George Tenet (who authorized war crimes as CIA head), admirer of Dick Cheney, CEO of the company one of whose contract employees improperly accessed Obama's and McCain's passports, and defender of renditions and "enhanced interrogations" is still Obama's front-runner pick to head the CIA.

And this is what the Atlantic reported:

But, as George Tenet's chief of staff and deputy executive dierctor, Brennan was undoubtedly read into some of the Bush Administration's more controversial intelligence programs, although there is no evidence that he made decisions. In interviews since leaving the government, Brennan has expressed support for the government's rendition policy, calling it effective, "enhanced" interrogation techniques and immunity for telecommunications companies involved in government spying efforts.

More stuff Jack leaves out.

But then Jack takes an odd turn:

Many of those worried about Mr. Panetta have an outdated view of the importance of the CIA. After 9/11 a huge new layer of bureaucracy was imposed on the intelligence community. This was mostly stupid, because there was too much bureaucracy already. But it made the CIA much less important.

Most of the intelligence we gather is collected by the National Security Agency, through its electronic eavesdropping, and by the satellite photos taken by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

The CIA essentially got out of the HUMINT business (human intelligence) when the Clinton administration slashed its budget in the early 1990s. Most of such little intelligence as the CIA now gathers comes from the interrogation of prisoners. But most prisoner interrogations are done by the military.

The CIA still has its analysis branch, which has missed most of the major developments of the last 20 years. And analysis work has been migrating to the various multi-agency intelligence centers established after 9/11.

So the CIA, in Jack view, has a diminished level of importance. He goes on:

The real head cheese is the director of national intelligence. For this job Mr. Obama has selected retired Adm. Dennis Blair. He's a former commander of Pacific Command, a former associate director of the CIA and a Rhodes scholar who once water-skied behind the destroyer he was commanding.

So now I'm lost. The reduced CIA is headed by someone Jack feels isn't qualified. But "the real head cheese" (i.e. the person really in charge) is qualified?

So what's Jack worried about?

By the way one small fact check. Jack writes:

The CIA essentially got out of the HUMINT business (human intelligence) when the Clinton administration slashed its budget in the early 1990s.

You hear that often from the right wing media. But is it true? Hard to tell. Politifact has the story - starting from Rudy Giuliani making the charge that the CIA budget was reduced by Clinton. It's all based on the testimony of former CIA-head cheese George Tenet.

Things get more complicated after that:

It is true that Clinton oversaw decreases in the intelligence budget and that Tenet has described the budget situation when he became CIA director in 1997, four years into Clinton’s presidency, as a disaster. But Tenet has never placed blame on Clinton in the way Giuliani describes (which makes sense since Clinton made him director).

Likewise, Giuliani neglects to provide some important context: The CIA budget cuts began under the first President Bush and were reversed, under Tenet’s leadership, late in the Clinton presidency and before the 9/11 attacks.

And:

But Tenet doesn’t say whether Clinton accelerated the rate of decline or followed the trend begun by Bush, and proving it is impossible. That’s because, with the exception of the current fiscal year and fiscal years 1997 and 1998 — when Tenet agreed to release the overall budget figure after the Federation of American Scientists filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit — the government has classified the intelligence budget on national security grounds.

And then finally:

In his testimony to the 9/11 Commission, Tenet said that he’d made considerable headway in boosting the agency’s resources prior to the 9/11 attacks. “Between 1999 and 2001, our human agent base against the terrorist target grew by over 50 percent,” he said.

Interesting what you can find once you actually look.

A New Wrinkle about Plame

I stumbled across this at TPMCafe yesterday.

Larry Johnson, the author, has worked for the CIA and for the State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counter Terrorism. So I think he probably knows what he's talking about.

He writes:

In 2004 the FBI received intelligence that Al Qaeda hit teams were enroute to the United States to kill Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Valerie Plame. The FBI informed Valerie of this threat. This was just more “good” news piled on the fact that her intelligence career was in shambles, that intelligence assets she had recruited/managed were destroyed, and that she was unable to rebut publicly false and malicious smears of her character and reputation by a bunch of partisan Republican hacks. As the mother of two pre-school children, her first thoughts were about protecting her kids. She took the threat seriously and asked for help.
When the White House learned of these threats they sprung into action. They beefed up Secret Service protection for Vice President Cheney and provided security protection to Karl Rove. But they declined to do anything for Valerie. That was a CIA problem.

Valerie contacted the office of Security at CIA and requested assistance. They told her too fucking bad and to go pound sand. They did not use those exact words, but they told her she was on her own.

Nice folks over there in the Bush Administration, huh? George Tenet doesn't come off any nicer. Larry Johnson, again:

[Tenet] refused to come to the aid of one of his CIA officers who faced a specific death threat. In fact, Georgie boy never once reached out to Valerie to provide any comfort or encouragement. He wanted to stay on good terms with the White House so he effectively cut her loose.

Nice guys over there. Not only do they initiate a policy resulting in the deaths of nearly 4,000 American servicemen and women, not only do they uncover the identity of a CIA operative (in violation of the law) who's the wife of a critic of that policy, they do nothing for her safety when receiving intelligence that her life may be in danger.

Jack Kelly Sunday

Take a look at today's column by Jack Kelly. It's only partially surprising that he trots out, at one point, the old war horse blaming of 9/11 on Bill Clinton at least in part. I say partially because that argument's been a standard of the wingnut right from about 9/12. Need some evidence? Here's Bill Press, then at CNN, writing in mid-October, 2oo1:

The attacks of September 11 were only a few hours old when conservative Congressman Dana Rohrbacher, R-California, blamed Clinton, not the terrorists: “We had Bill Clinton, backing off, letting the Taliban go, over and over again.”

Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh trumpeted on the pages of the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Clinton can be held culpable for not doing enough when he was commander-in-chief to combat the terrorists who wound up attacking the World Trade Center and Pentagon.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who resigned in disgrace, also chimed in, citing Clinton’s “pathetically weak, ineffective ability to focus and stay focused.”

Jack begins his tale in Seattle. The FBI up there has been circulating the photos of a couple of men who they said were acting suspiciously on the state ferries up there. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer refused to publish the photos. The reason?

"We have no confirmation that these men's behavior was anything but innocuous, and to forever taint them by associating them with terrorism under these circumstances is not consistent with our policy," said managing editor David McCumber.

To Jack, that's enough. Those two guys were acting suspiciously and so their photos should be plastered all over the area, tagging them as terrorists. Jack's criticism is that they Seattle P-I is taking the "law enforcement approach" to terror. The FBI, he writes, thinks it's more important to keep a ferry from being bombed than it is to arrest the bombers afterward.

See? They're already bombers to Jack Kelly. Bombers that need to be stopped.

However, from the P-I's reporting earlier this week of the incident:

The FBI has no information suggesting that a terrorist attack on the ferry system is imminent, [Special Agent Robbie] Burroughs said.

For weeks, the FBI has been trying to identify the men through "normal law enforcement channels," she said.

So not only did the FBI have no information that a terrorist attack was imminent but the Bureau, too, seems to be taking the "law enforcement approach" in tracking down these guys.

Something Jack didn't tell us.

Also, I gotta ask: if the guys were actually planning to commit an act of terror, isn't that already a crime? So Jack's simple reasoning of "they think that until the bomb goes off, there's no crime" is just nuts, as his his projection of it onto Democrats in Congress.

But let's get to the meat of the column.

We were reminded of the weakness of the law enforcement approach by the release last week of the executive summary of the report of the CIA's inspector general on the CIA's performance before 9/11. The CIA was hamstrung in its efforts to fight al-Qaida by severe budget cuts imposed by the Clinton administration, but then CIA Director George Tenet did a poor job of managing the funds he had, and never developed an overall strategy to fight terror, the IG report said.

There it is! The CIA was hamstrung by budget cuts - and so it's CLINTON'S fault. I used to read Kelly's column always wondering how long it took him to blame whatever he was writing about on the Clinton Administration. This column he pushes the wingnut button in the 8th (out of 13) paragraph. By the way, here's what the report actually says:

Funding for the Agency's counterterrorism programs increased significantly from Fiscal Year (FY)1998 to FY2001 as a result of supplemental appropriations. These funds were appropriated, in part, because of the efforts of the CIA's director and senior leaders to convince the administration and Congress that the Agency was short of resources for counterterrorism and other resources.

That was page 6. On page 7 it says:

The Team did find, however, that during the same period they were appealing the shortage of resources, senior officials were not effectively managing the Agency's counterterrorism funds.

So Jack got it half right. The CIA's funds for counterterrorism, according to this report "increased significantly" from '98 to '01. Wasn't Bill Clinton president in 1998? 1999? 2000? In fact, the CIA was redistributing funds away from its counterterrorism programs though:

The Team found that the Agency made little use of the Reserve for Contingencies to support its counterterrorism effort. Finally CTC managers did not spend all of the funds in their base budget, even after it had been reduced by diversions of funds to other programs.

But to Jack Kelly, there were severe budget cuts during the Clinton Administration that lead to the CIA's failures to stop 9/11. Couldn't help himself, I guess.

Then there's this about Michael Scheuer:

Counter-terror efforts also were crippled by President Clinton's insistence that Osama bin Laden be arrested rather than assassinated, Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's bin Laden unit, has said. The IG report acknowledges this was a problem, but "concludes the Agency's covert action against bin Laden lay not in the language and interpretations of its authorities, but in the limitations of its covert action capabilities."

However, Michael Scheuer has also said:

But what troubles me most is Tenet's handling of the opportunities that CIA officers gave the Clinton administration to capture or kill bin Laden between May 1998 and May 1999. Each time we had intelligence about bin Laden's whereabouts, Tenet was briefed by senior CIA officers at Langley and by operatives in the field. He would nod and assure his anxious subordinates that he would stress to Clinton and his national security team that the chances of capturing bin Laden were solid and that the intelligence was not going to get better. Later, he would insist that he had kept up his end of the bargain, but that the NSC had decided not to strike.

Since 2001, however, several key Clinton counterterrorism insiders (including NSC staffers Richard A. Clarke, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon) have reported that Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin Laden, causing the president and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won intelligence. "We could never get over the critical hurdle of being able to corroborate Bin Ladin's whereabouts," Tenet now writes. That of course is untrue, but it spared him from ever having to explain the awkward fallout if an attempt to get bin Laden failed. None of this excuses Clinton's disinterest in protecting Americans, but it does show Tenet's easy willingness to play for patsies the CIA officers who risked their lives to garner intelligence and then to undercut their work to avoid censure if an attack went wrong.

Setting aside the "Clinton's disinterest in protecting Americans" crap, Scheuer himself lays the blame at Tenet's feet.

The same George Tenet who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the current occupant of the Oval Office.

And it only took me that long to criticize dubya.