Sympathy for the Company?
posted at 11:29 am on April 27, 2009 by Karl
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On Friday, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds sardonically commented:
I’D FEEL SORRIER FOR THE C.I.A. FOLKS, if they hadn’t run a multiyear leak-war against the Bush Administration. Did they really think electing Obama would improve their situation? Once again, they don’t seem to have gamed things out to the end.
In an update, he conceded that there is a difference between the officers of the National Clandestine Service who do the hard work in the field, and the stripey-pants analysts, who second-guess things at langley. Nevertheless, Prof. Reynolds asserts that if “CIA leadership had wanted to shut down those leaks, I think it probably could have.” True enough, except that the Bush Administration was undermined by folks at the top of the CIA for years. It is the entrenched bureaucracy at the CIA that ran the leak war, underwrote Bush’s opponents, and so on.
Thus, it is notable that those protesting the Obama Administration’s release of the interrogation memos include not only former Bush CIA chief Porter Goss — who was successfully resisted by the entrenched CIA bureaucracy — but also by former spies like Michael Scheuer, who was allowed to publish the book Imperial Hubris as part of the bureacracy’s anti-Bush campaign. Indeed, he penned a fairly blistering op-ed on the subject in the Washington Post yesterday.
Scheuer and his Company sponsors may deserve no sympathy. However, we should not let schadenfreude obscure our national security concerns. The fact that people like Scheuer are adding their voices to the criticism of these document dumps is an alarm bell, signaling just how much harm that Obama’s Leftist moral posturing is doing to our human intelligence capabilities.
Cross-posted at Patterico.
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I recall the words of one senior-level Middle Eastern intelligence official years ago, “I’d be happy to provide that information to you, but you Americans have no concept of secrecy.”
While the Left, the Obamatrons in and out of government, scramble to get more “dirt” out to embarrass Bush, they justify it all with “America demands to know” and other such jejune pap.
And when I, and others, point out that lives are at risk…I usually get “well, the CIA officers knew it was dangerous when they took the job” trying to somehow defend the exposure of a few present and former CIA operations officers in the name of “the people want to know,” forgetting entirely, willfully or by sheer stupidity, that the lives that are at risk most are not present and former CIA officials…but their own…and those of dedicated foreign assets who risk it all to provide that information.
If we depended on getting all our intelligence information from CNN, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once suggested as he attempted to shut down CIA years ago…there’d be a lot more rogue regimes, and a lot more innocents killed, and a lot more chaos in the world today.
With Obama as one example of a world leader…world leaders lie to the public. World leaders lie. News reporters report what they hear. Public domain information. What foreign leaders want us to hear.
The men and women at the tip of the spear have a task, an enormous one, to find out what those various world leaders think, believe, and plan in their private moments, away from the press conferences, off camera, out of range of CNN.
We don’t focus our efforts on the world leaders…we focus our efforts on those in the inner circles of those leaders…on their trusted confidants, their staff officers, their secretaries, their confidential assistants…and in doing that, we obtain information no reporter from CNN will ever get.
At times fragmentary information, at times contradictory information, but information those who provide such will face certain imprisonment, often death, if it is found out they passed it along to the United States government.
And when the hundreds and thousands of those who have access to their leadership’s most secret secrets see that members of our government, and our Fifth Estate are more than willing to divulge classified information in order to play inside-the-Beltway games…they stop providing anything out of fear that information, secrets, will be traced back to them by their own internal security apparatus.
They pay for our Beltway games with their lives.
Who in their right mind would run that risk?
I used alias, alias documents, used all sorts of cover, not to protect myself, but to protect the safety and lives of those foreign assets, developmentals, and just plain ordinary foreign officials who had infromtation of critical value they felt, they knew, was needed by the better angels to stop the evil angels that rule across the world.
No. Americans have no concept of secrecy.
Too many bad movie plots, too many dime novels, too many faulty assumptions about the entire clandestine service that is the tip of the spear.
If Congress and the President, and critics of all stripes, want to shut down our clandestine services, then do so. Openly.
Make it a matter of record who was responsible for the neutering of the front lines of our national defense.
Do it. Instead of being the ultimate coward..causing chaos and death, and more danger in the world…blaming it on those at the tip of the spear instead of accepting the blame themselves.
coldwarrior on April 27, 2009 at 12:15 PM