A Stitch in Haste

Among the (many) problems with the Bush Administration is one that was demonstrated yet again over the weekend, with the search for a replacement for CIA Director Porter Goss:

The President simply does not understand the concept of specialization.

Consider Harriet Miers: To Bush, she was simply "a lawyer." This made her, in Bush's mind, qualified for a seat on the Supreme Court. The notion of specialization — the idea that perhaps something more is needed in a candidate for Associate Justice — simply did not register. To this day the White House never admitted that the nomination was preposterous; instead they invented a smokescreen about access to privileged documents.

Or consider Karl Rove: To Bush, he is simply "an adviser." This made him, again in Bush's mind, qualified to take on the White House policy portfolio, even though his expertise is not policy but politics.

And now we have the unequivocally unacceptable nomination of General Michael V. Hayden to become Director of Central Intelligence. Why? Because Hayden is "an intelligence guy." The fact that he is a military intelligence guy and the raison d’être of the CIA is to coordinate civilian intelligence, is overlooked.

But even Hayden's "round peg in square hole" résumé isn't the ultimate reason why he simply cannot be confirmed as DCI. It's the fact that Hayden, as chief apologist for the President's illegal warrantless wiretapping program, makes him not just tainted goods but hopelessly damaged goods. A key problem with the warrantless wiretap program is the Administration's Kafkaesque blurring of the line between "foreign" and "domestic" intelligence. The mission of the CIA is limited to foreign intelligence gathering only. Do we really want someone who has gone out of his way to see no difference between "foreign" and "domestic" spying to be in charge of the former?

The President has still not been properly brought to task for lying to the American people, twice, about the existence and nature of the NSA's "Terrorist Surveillance Program," but now he wants to put all civilian foreign intelligence under a military officer who is a key participant in the White House's "dictator in time of war" theory of executive power?

Not acceptable.

Here's a radical idea: let's keep military personnel in the military and leave the civilian bureaucracies for civilians. Let's bring the notion of specialization back into our specialized agencies.

The initial read is that both career CIA employees as well as many Senators — including Republicans — seem to concur that Hayden's nomination is problematic. Good.

Between Hayden's role in the warrantless wiretap scandal and the military-civilian mismatch between his résumé and the actual job, he must not be confirmed as DCI. Let's hope the Republicans in the Senate do the right thing.

Keep the military in the military. And blacklist any participants in the warrantless wiretapping scandal from career advancement.

Let's start putting the brakes on this Administration's nomination recklessness.

More thoughts from Unclaimed Territory, PoliBlog.