Democrat hostility to intelligence

Michael Hayden:

When CIA officers went to work at the Langley headquarters last Tuesday, the first item in the daily press summary prepared by their public affairs office took their breath away.

"Democrats: CIA Out to Get Us" was the way Politico headlined a piece on recent Capitol Hill events. For an agency that had been criticized from the right for a supposed organized campaign to undermine President Bush in the 2004 election and criticized again in 2007 for a national intelligence estimate that was purportedly written and timed to undercut the administration's Iran policy, the accusation must have seemed like comic relief.

Comic relief or not, any smiles were gone by midday Thursday when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi explicitly accused the agency of lying - "The CIA comes to the Congress, withholds information about the timing and theuse of this subject" - and of lying frequently - "They mislead us all the time."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, hastened to add, "The CIA is not an agency that is above not telling the truth." Rep. Anna G. Eshoo, a senior member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, chimed in: "You have to play 20 questions with them. They are not forthcoming with information."

In my first hand-off with the new CIA Director, Leon E. Panetta, I told him that one area I felt needed a lot of improvement was the relationship between the agency and Congress. I pointed out that we had tried hard. In practically every category of dialogue with the Hill - briefings, hearings, written notifications - the statistics for CIA engagement with the 110th Congress dwarfed those for any of its predecessors. But more information did not routinely lead to any calming of the atmosphere. It was just wild.

At the height of the Iraq surge debate, for example, we briefed a wide swath of congressional members. Because of the superheated atmosphere, we prepared our analysts (many of whom were now very junior because of our recent hiring) with a short sentence to help them cut off overly contentious or overtly partisan sessions: "I'm sorry, but I will be unable to continue our dialogue if you continue to question my integrity or that of my Agency."

Even senior analysts were taken aback by how caustic the exchange could become. At one memorable offsite briefing that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell had arranged for the House Intelligence Committee and all the intelligence community leadership, several intelligence seniors went off the agenda and asked for the committee's help in responding to a story that had appeared that morning in a major daily. The story was long and difficult to track but it followed the usual pattern of such stories by going to what we would call the "darkest corner of the room" with threatening overtones of large databases, data mining and serious civil liberties infringements.

...

... when this system becomes hopelessly adversarial, there are real costs. Without some elemental baseline of trust and confidence, no Congress, no executive, no intelligence agency can make it work.

...

It is my speculation that this hostility was from Democrats who were frustrated that the information they were getting was not supporting the political position they were taking. In other words they were trying to politicize intelligence in a way they had accused the Bush administration of doing before going into Iraq.

Democrats have been dishonest in criticizing the preinvasion Iraq intelligence making bad faith allegations against the Bush administration. When the intelligence proved inaccurate they chose to blame the administration rather than admit that the intelligence agencies had made an honest mistake. Then they attacked the agencies for not supporting their position desperately seeking defeat in Iraq.

The Democrats bad faith is showing again and it will undermine their own President's administration.