CIA'S COUNTER-TERRORISM HEAD FIRED FOR OPPOSING TORTURE

What's good for Dubya and Goss ain't good for the CIA...or America, for that matter.

The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as “water boarding”, intelligence sources have claimed.
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Porter Goss, who was appointed head of the CIA in August 2004 with a mission to “clean house”, has been angered by a series of leaks from CIA insiders, including revelations about “black sites” in Europe where top Al-Qaeda detainees were said to have been held.
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Goss is believed to have blamed Grenier for allowing leaks to occur on his watch.

Since the appointment of Goss, the CIA has lost almost all its high-level directors amid considerable turmoil.

AB “Buzzy” Krongard, a former executive director of the CIA who resigned shortly after Goss’s arrival, said the leaks were unlikely to stop soon, despite proposals to subject officers to more lie detector tests.

Krongard said it was up to President George Bush to stop the rot. “The agency has only one client: the president of the United States,” he said. “The reorganisation is the way this president wanted it. If he is unwilling to reform it, the agency will go on as it is.”

“History will judge how good an idea it was to destroy the teams and the programmes that were in place.”

Let's see, just how many formerly effectively operating institutions does that make now that the Bush administration has destroyed? Well, there's FEMA, of course. Then there's the U.S. military (read this post on Military.com). Now, in a declared effort to reform and improve the CIA, Bush has made it less effective, more political, and fired or chased away most of the experienced senior officials who actually know how to gather intelligence that means something and have some shred of decent American values.

How can we afford three more years of these guys? And how on earth are we going to be able to fix their mess even if we vote the buggers out?

Hat tip to Bad Attitudes Buck.

Tags: CIA, Bush, torture, Porter Goss