Republican complaints about CIA

Robert Novak:

OUTRAGE over the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes is but one element of the distress about the agency by Republican intelligence watchdogs in Congress. "It is acting as though it is autonomous, not accountable to anyone," Rep. Peter Hoekstra, ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told me. That is his mildest language about the CIA. In carefully selected adjectives, Hoekstra calls it "incompetent, arrogant and political."

Chairman Silvestre Reyes and other Intelligence Committee Democrats join Hoekstra in demanding investigation of the tape destruction in the face of the administration's resistance, but the Republicans stand alone in protesting the CIA's defiant undermining of President Bush.

In its clean bill of health for Iran on nuclear-weapons development, the agency acted as an independent policymaker rather than an adviser. It has withheld from nearly all members of Congress information on the Sept. 6 Israeli bombing of Syria. The U.S. intelligence community decides on its own what information the public shall learn.

Accusations of a rogue agency come from Republicans who see a conscious undermining of Bush at Langley. The CIA's contempt for the president was demonstrated during his 2004 re-election campaign when a senior intelligence officer, Paul R. Pillar, made off-the-record speeches around the country criticizing the invasion of Iraq.

On Sept. 24, 2004, former Rep. Porter Goss arrived at Langley as Bush's handpicked CIA director. Goss had resigned from Congress to accept Bush's mandate to clean up the CIA. But the president buckled under fire from the old boys at Langley and their Democratic supporters, and Goss was sacked in May 2006.

Goss' successor, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, restored the status quo ante at the CIA and nurtured relations with congressional Democrats. Hayden, an active-duty Air Force general who lives in government housing, first antagonized Hoekstra by telling Reyes what the Democrats wanted to hear about the Valerie Plame CIA leak case.

There is no partisan divide on congressional outrage over the CIA's destruction of tapes showing interrogation of terrorism detainees. Hoekstra agrees with Reyes that the Bush administration has made a big mistake by refusing to let officials testify in the impending investigation.

Republicans also complain that the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluding that Iran has shut down its nuclear-weapons program was a case of the CIA's flying solo, not as part of the administration team. Donald M. Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence, on Dec. 3 "took responsibility for what portions of the NIE Key Judgments were to be declassified."

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The CIA is at a disadvantage in many of these arguments because some of its reasoning is based on classified information. I don't believe the destruction of the interrogation tapes is that important. It is only important to those who want to make a scape goat of CIA officers in a hind sight investigation of actions they would have supported at the time. I am much more concerned about the rogue political activities of employees like Valerie Plame and others who tried to cover their incompetence and mistakes with political attacks. They have not done a good job and their political blame shifting is unworthy of the agency.