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| Home Front: Politix |
| The Attorney and the General |
| 2010-02-04 |
| As Hayden points out, the policy decisions that President Obama has allowed Holder to make are significant -- not only taken one by one, but in their cumulative effect on the ethos of our intelligence agencies. "Intelligence officers," he writes, "need to know that someone has their back." After Holder forced the release in April of classified memos prepared by Bush Justice Department lawyers, laying out interrogation tactics and the legal rationale for permitting them, "CIA officers began to ask whether the people doing things that were currently authorized would be dragged through this kind of public knothole in five years. No one could guarantee that they would not." The paralysis wrought by this decision transcends the narrow subject of interrogations. All intelligence collection is infected. If you can't/don't collect intelligence in a war against a secretive, transnational jihadist network, you stand to lose -- and a lot of Americans stand to die. Thus, Hayden concludes, "Some may celebrate that the current Justice Department's perspective on the war on terrorism has become markedly more dominant in the past year. We should probably understand the implications of that before we break out the champagne." |
| Posted by:ed |
| #2 "Intelligence officers," he writes, "need to know that someone has their back." In his sights? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2010-02-04 12:13 |
| #1 There is a flip side to this. Of the 12 national intelligence agencies in the US, there has been a strong tendency to act without controls or restraint, flouting both the president and congress. One of the most egregious examples of this was the construction of a satellite tracking installation using entirely black budget monies. This was only discovered by congress after it had been built, and the intelligence agency responsible responded by thumbing its nose at the House and Senate Intelligence committees as being powerless to stop them. This overlaps as well into the over 40 national police agencies that are indirectly funded, and funded by RICO confiscations outside of the budget process, and who now, with post-911 rules, operate outside of any elected government constraint. Eventually, if there is a major economic collapse, the US Attorney General is going to have to shut down a lot of this nonsense, even if it is self-funding, as it is operating outside of the government, but with government authority. While intelligence agents operating "in the field" need rules that will last beyond a single administration, and cannot be retroactively changed, this is a very small problem compared to the flow of billions of dollars for unauthorized and often very unlawful purposes. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2010-02-04 10:29 |