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Tomgram: Johnson on Creating a Worthless Intelligence Agency

Two weeks after George Bush's reelection, Porter J. Goss, the newly appointed Director of Central Intelligence, wrote an internal memorandum to all employees of his agency telling them, "[Our job is to] support the administration and its policies in our work. As agency employees, we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies."[1] Translated from bureaucrat-speak, this directive says, "You now work for the Republican Party. The intelligence you produce must first and foremost protect the President from being held accountable for the delusions he has concerning Iraq, Osama bin Laden, preventive war, torturing captives, democracy growing from the barrel of a gun, and the 'war on terror.'"

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Year Of The Spy

The year 2005 promises to be the Year of the Spy. More and more—from the Goss-led purge at the CIA to the battle over intelligence "reform" to the planned, vast expansion of spookdom—America's foreign policy is shaping up to be more covert than ever. Does that worry anyone but me? Apparently content that Goss will crush CIA opposition to neoconservative foreign policy, the president has ordered a stunning 50 percent increase in both operations and analysis at CIA. Now let's put this in context. During the Cold War, when the Soviet Union had the ability to obliterate the United States in 24 hours, and the United States was engaged in dozens of proxy, hot wars around the globe (Central America, Angola, the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, etc.), we got along with an intelligence budget about half the current one. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, U.S. intelligence spending has ballooned from something like $27 billion to the current, estimated $40 billion. And now Bush wants a 50 percent increase in spooks, adding untold billions to the budget?

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