Portrait of a Horse's A$$

Her beauty exceeded only by her charm, Margaret Carlson epitomizes why we should all be serious about birth control.

Sunday, May 14, 2006
What CIA needs is new president
By MARGARET CARLSONGUEST COLUMNIST (sic)
When the GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee immediately objected to the prospect of Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden heading the Central Intelligence Agency, I knew the president would appoint him. Nothing stiffens The Decider's spine like someone presuming to contradict him.
In some ways Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency, is actually a high-water mark in Bush headhunting. Hayden's resume, unlike those of Harriet Miers, Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff, is at least thematically related to the core requirements of the job.
Yet Rep. Peter Hoekstra, head of the intelligence committee, has valid reasons for calling Hayden the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time. It's not that he's a military man -- four CIA heads have been that -- but that the military has already grabbed an outsized amount of authority over intelligence under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who can shape it to his liking when it's in his own back yard.
Nor do members of Congress share the White House's view that its tough-on-terrorism credentials are burnished only by elevating the man who gave us warrantless wiretaps and then demonstrated a disturbing enthusiasm for repeating Karl Rove's talking points in defending them.
Hayden's nomination is one more chapter in the Bush administration's campaign to simultaneously punish the CIA for not completely rolling over in the run-up to the war and blame it for suckering the Congress and public into the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation. It's quite a card trick for the president and vice president to slice and dice the info to their needs, add homegrown material from Rumsfeld's shop as needed, and then claim we were all fooled by the same faulty data.
Since then, George W. Bush's plan on intelligence is the opposite of the old saw that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. His is "if it ain't broke, break it." Then put the fix in.
Bush started by appointing former low-level CIA case worker and Florida Rep. Porter Goss to replace George "Slam Dunk" Tenet. And what a heckuva job Goss did until he was shown the door several days ago.
Goss brought in a raft of political operatives from Capitol Hill who knew nothing about intelligence and everything about insulting the Langley veterans who helped end the Cold War. His strange choice as executive director was Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who resigned Monday amid reports in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that he took part in poker games at the Watergate Hotel arranged by Brent Wilkes, a contractor and longtime friend of Foggo's.
Wilkes was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case that sent former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham to federal prison for accepting bribes. Prosecutors are investigating whether Wilkes and the fellow contractor who bribed Cunningham provided Watergate suites and prostitutes to him and others, the Journal reported on May 2. A CIA spokesman confirmed to the Journal that Foggo attended some of the poker games but said he never saw any prostitutes or did anything improper.
Thank goodness for what bloggers are calling Watergategate. Mere rank incompetence isn't usually enough to move Bush to get rid of an appointee.
The spin out of the White House about Goss' resignation is that he was having a turf war with intelligence czar John Negroponte, whose very job it is to end turf wars. If that's the positive spin, imagine what the truth must look like.
Negroponte is the winner in the assault on the CIA so far. He has limited training for the job and it's hard to know precisely what he's going to do. Is the intent to merge all intelligence operations into his? If so, we're in for the Bureaucratic Rumble of the Century between him and Rumsfeld.
Is he going to put all his eggs into the high-tech basket, reducing the already depleted clandestine operations at the CIA?
Hayden is all about equipment. The greatest high-tech bungle of recent years is the multibillion-dollar hole dug at the NSA by his Trailblazer system, which was recently put out of its misery. Although Hayden's machines sometimes worked, as when the NSA recovered the message on Sept. 10, 2001, that "Tomorrow is zero hour," he lacked the human intelligence to translate it.
If Bush opts to overweight technology, intelligence may turn out to be one more policy area in which the president is duped by someone else's fantasy.
The CIA could use some oversight, which it would have if Congress were still alive, and needs more analysts who know the countries, languages and gathering places of the terrorists we seek to defeat. Most of all, it needs a firewall making it impervious to manipulation by presidents and their minions. That's one thing we know won't happen on Bush's watch, no matter who sits at the top.
Margaret Carlson writes for Bloomberg News; mcarlson3@bloomberg.net.

The emphasis is mine. Can she really believe that the CIA should be independent of the President? And, Maggie, George "Slam Dunk" Tenet was a Clinton appointee, remember?

Lord deliver us from Liberals for they know not what they do, or worse, they know it full well.

Update: I can't let this go.

From her bio...

"Margaret Carlson was named a columnist for TIME magazine in February 1994. Her column, Public Eye, makes Carlson the first woman columnist in the magazine's 78-year history.

Prior to coming to TIME, Carlson served as the magazine's deputy Washington bureau chief, after serving as a White House correspondent."

I have to ask how was she Time's "deputy Washington bureau chief" if she wasn't already employed by Time?

I'm so confused.

Perhaps they meant to say, "Prior to becoming the magazine's deputy Washington bureau chief, Carlson served as a White House correspondent."

But, then again, who am I to question Time?