Political Goss

"There really should be a yellow sign around the Langley Headquarters of CIA, 'Politicians may go no further'" --Ray McGovern, PBS News Hour, 8/10/2004

The Goss nomination to the CIA speaks volumes. First, no one with any objectivity is going to be allowed to run Bush's CIA. Only a highly political and loyal Republican operative can be trusted to keep the secrets of this administration's incredible duplicity, malfeasance, and embarrassing connections to unsavory elements. Furthermore, the Goss nomination is nakedly political with respect to the November election.

Terence Hunt's analysis in an AP release today has it right, "More broadly the nomination reinforced Bush's efforts to keep the nation focused on the war on terrorism, his strongest suit in his battle for re-election."

The News Hour on Tuesday was as close to terrific as it ever gets. Former DCI Stansfield Turner (Carter Administration) and former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern, a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity laid out a case against Goss. Here's how Ray McGovern wrapped it up:

At the end of [the joint Congressional committee that was the first to investigate 9/11], their final report left out all the information having to do with what the president of the United States was told prior to 9/11. The White House forbade that from being in the final report. Eleanor Hill, the executive director of that committee remonstrated loudly.

Porter Goss gave in to the White House, and so that report was ipso facto, incomplete, because it contained lots of stuff, but nothing on what the president was told before 9/11. That's proof positive to me that you've got a partisan person here who will do the bidding of the White House. And that's precisely why he's been nominated and nominated now because the controversy will now be centered on the failure of intelligence, Iraq, 9/11, failure of intelligence and no attention being given to the failure of the president.

I'll go further. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the 911 report winks that tracing the financing of the plot was of little "practical significance". But who on September 11, 2001 was taking a leisurely breakfast, just as the planes hit, with a Pakistani intelligence figure implicated in just such financing? Why, Porter Goss himself! Now I'm sure Representative Goss was not privy to the plot, but this goes to show that there is deep mystery about 911 that will stay buried with the political operative Porter Goss as DCI.