The New York Sun Editorial The Goss Nomination August 12, 2004 President Bush's choice to be director of central intelligence, Rep. Porter Goss, a Republican of Florida who was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has shown precious little evidence so far of being the right man for the job.
Some say that Mr. Goss, a former CIA officer, is too close to the CIA to perform the shake-up that the agency badly needs. "He's part of a failed culture," the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen told our Luiza Savage. AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht,who has been sounding the alarm about the CIA's failures since the publication of his 1997 book "Know Thine Enemy,"derides Mr.Goss as "a water-carrier for the CIA." This isn't criticism coming from the anti-CIA hard left, but from men who understand that America is in a war in which a capable CIA with strong intelligence-gathering and analytic capabilities could be a formidable asset. Mr. Goss's worst policy error was to deride the Iraqi National Congress and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi. Had America listened to Mr. Chalabi's advice about the importance of Iraqi participation in the liberation of Iraq and the need for postwar planning, the current difficulties for American troops in Iraq could have been avoided. But Mr. Goss disparaged Iraqis who risked their lives to fight Saddam. "It's unspeakable to me that we would be putting any money in the pockets of expatriates who are talking about revolution in the comfortable capitals of Western Europe. Every time you do that, all the bootmakers and suit-makers in London just cheer," Mr. Goss told USA Today in 1999. Amid the anonymous and so far unproven smears this spring of Mr. Chalabi as a leaker of American secrets to the Iranians, Mr. Goss declined to defend the Iraqi patriot, telling USA Today, "I have been accurate in my assessment of Chalabi over the years. The thing I admire most about him is his tailor." This isn't merely about Mr. Chalabi but a whole CIA culture that derided Shiite Muslims and democrats and took information provided by non-democratic, Sunni American "friends" in Jordan or Saudi Arabia as gospel. As chairman of the House intelligence committee, Mr. Goss was in charge of congressional oversight of the intelligence community. The report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States concluded that the oversight was largely a failure. Mr. Goss's signal achievement on the personnel management front was hiring a chief of staff for the House intelligence committee who wound up a sordid suicide. Recently, and conveniently, Mr. Goss has refashioned himself as one of the CIA's harshest critics. His committee's most recent intelligence authorization report includes a scathing critique of the agency's human intelligence collection efforts. "For too long the CIA has been ignoring its core mission activities.There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action," reads the report. "After years of trying to convince, suggest, urge, entice, cajole, and pressure CIA to make wide-reaching changes to the way it conducts its HUMINT mission, however, CIA, in the Committee's view, continues down a road leading over a proverbial cliff." If he's to have any chance of success in the director's job, he will have to keep in mind the need for corrective action -- both at the agency and in the course he himself has chosen.
