Apropos of the Hayden CIA director hearings I have just spent a few hours at, trust me, you will want to read the latest from Ken Silverstein. The long and short of it is that a series of CIA station chiefs in Iraq found themselves farmed out of their jobs after reporting developments on the ground that did not comport with the administration's hopes for Iraq; those who had rosier reports got promoted:

A number of current and former intelligence officials have told me that the administration's war on internal dissent has crippled the CIA's ability to provide realistic assessments from Iraq. “The system of reporting is shut down,” said one person familiar with the situation. “You can't write anything honest, only fairy tales.” [...]

The fate of those two station chiefs had a predictable effect. In 2005, I'm told, the Baghdad station chief filed but a single Aardwolf. The report, which one person told me was widely derided within the CIA as “a joke,” asserted that the United States was winning the war despite all evidence to the contrary. It was garbage, but garbage the Bush administration wanted to hear; at the end of his tour, that Station Chief was given a plum assignment. “This is a time of war,” said one former intelligence official. “Every day American kids are getting killed over there. We need steady, focused reporting [from Baghdad] but no one is willing to speak out since they know they'll get shot down.”

“The CIA's ability to speak honestly is gone,” concluded the official, “which is extraordinarily dangerous to our country.”

Go read. It would seem to be quite a delicate incentive system Agency hands and their prospective leadership have to navigate.

The Hayden hearing was fascinating. A close listen to his testimony offered a glimpse of a far more complex internal debate and concern about recently revealed intelligence policy decisions and their legal bases than you might expect. Hayden notably responded to a question from Sen. Feinstein that he himself had not read the Justice Department's legal rationale for the expanded domestic telecom data collection -- suggesting perhaps that legal finding is not in writing, or if it was, has not been shared with him. He also noted that three of his advisors at NSA -- who he said agreed the President had the Article 2 authority to authorize the domestic telecom data collection -- had never issued written legal rationales for the decision; does someone not want to have their signature on this? One got a sense that Feinstein's series of questions and Hayden's careful answers were in a kind of code about what was in writing whose significance they both understood very well. Similarly, under questioning from Senators Olympia Snowe and Ron Wyden, Hayden never to my ears quite answered their question of who had determined that only the "Gang of Eight" should be briefed on the domestic surveillance programs - rather than the full Intelligence committee (which was finally briefed in full yesterday), as normally required by the 1947 National Security Act. And yet he managed to imply quite strongly that it would have been his preference to brief everybody. More here.

More from the NYT:

... If there's one thing senators can't stand, it's being left out of the loop by the White House. And if there's another thing they can't stand, it's reading about how they have been left out of the loop in their morning newspaper.

So when Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, asked why the full panel had been forced to wait until Wednesday afternoon, the eve of General Hayden's hearing, the nominee sat impassively, his hands clasped in front of him, his back stiff in his dress blues, four silver stars twinkling on each epaulet.

"Sir," he said steadily, "it was not my decision. I briefed fully whatever audience was in front of me, and I wouldn't attempt to explain the administration's decision."

That did not appear to satisfy Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine. Earlier in the day she had complained that the small number of lawmakers who were briefed before Wednesday were "handcuffed" because they were not permitted to share information with colleagues.

"The notification to a very limited group — they could do nothing much with that information, essentially — is not the kind of checks and balances that I think our founding fathers had in mind," Ms. Snowe said.

The hearing put General Hayden in an awkward position. President Bush has tried to keep secret the details of the eavesdropping, in which the security agency monitored, without seeking court warrants, the international communications of those suspected of having links to terrorists. Yet White House officials keep getting dragged into talking about the program, especially in the effort to get General Hayden confirmed.

Posted by Laura at May 18, 2006 01:28 PM