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Congratulations, Leon Panetta. When you decided, unexpectedly, to become Barack Obama’s CIA director, did you anticipate spending one of your first major addresses defusing an escalation in congressional-CIA acrimony? His message to a Los Angeles foreign policy group yesterday became the second part of his response to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who last week accused the intelligence agency of misrepresenting briefings she received in 2002 about the Bush-era "enhanced interrogation" regime. Part one, directed to his employees, was about bolstering agency morale. This is about repairing the breach with Congress, according to Siobhan Gorman’s coverage:
He vowed to improve the broken relationship between the CIA and Congress, noting that he plans tomorrow morning to have coffee with a group of lawmakers outside the public spotlight. He said that, “as a creature of Congress” he believes Congress should try to learn the lessons of the past, but not to the point of diverting the attention of CIA officers.
Something he didn’t say but might have thought: during the Bush era, when the politicization of intelligence ran high, the Democratic congress embraced the CIA as a reality-based bastion against the Bush agenda. That was fairly easy to do, especially when Bush appointed Porter Goss, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, to the directorship of the agency and Goss began firing people presumed to be insufficiently loyal to Bush-administration prerogatives. Congressional Democrats, led by Jane Harman (D-Calif.), made a point of distinguishing between the agency’s Bush-loyalist top management and the agency’s career personnel. And there the alignment remained, roughly, through Michael Hayden’s tenure. Criticisms of the agency — on torture, for instance — were directed at policymakers, not implementers. Obviously, the Democrats were more comfortable with the agency’s intelligence analysts than with case officers charged with the more morally compromising work of espionage, but there weren’t many Democrats of note who issued broad indictments of the agency.
Pelosi is the first to collapse the distinction. Her accusation, in context, didn’t blame CIA case officers or line analysts for lying to her. But by not sharpening her charge, it’s understandable that agency employees — who labor in a culture that believes itself under constant siege from politicians – would take it personally, and that’s what Panetta’s message on Friday was about. Congressional Republicans are right to see an opportunity to repair their iffy relationship with an agency that the party used as a whipping boy during the previous administration, even if they’re not going to defenestrate Pelosi.
Crossposted to The Streak.
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You mistake a political tactic for personal offense.
Regardless of whether your speculation about the internal psychological state of agency employees is correct, regardless of their individual motives or those of the many others who have joined this bandwagon, this is really about politics. To either be offended, or feign offense, at the notion that the CIA has ever been anything but honest with Congress, to collapse the distinction between criticizing the agency or its employees, is a tactic.
Just as the Bush Admin and its supporters attacked all criticism of the president’s policies as attacks on the troops, it is designed to make it difficult for critics to hold policy makers or the agency to account.
As you well know, anyone who believes that the CIA has been trustworthy in either the recent or distant t past is either lying or ignorant. It is in the interests of those who wish the CIA to operate without democratic restraints to say that they are “under constant siege from politicians.” It serves to justify unwarranted secrecy, to others as well as to themselves.
The problem with the CIA is not its people, but rather its design and place in the larger political system – it is set up to be as free from any restraints other than presidential will as possible. If this led it to great success, this would still be unacceptable in a democracy. Given its record, it is beyond scandalous.
Well, in her walk-back press release after Panetta’s (somewhat distorted by the media) letter to the CIA employees, Pelosi distinguished between the “Bush Administration” which had repeatedly misled both Congress and the public on a list of items too long to even contemplate and the dedicated, hard-working, etc etc CIA employees. But that’s not getting the same play as (the somewhat media distorted version of) her allegations during her press conference.