Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (PDNC)has posted a diary over at Daily Kos that brings together a lot of related events in April to show why Goss was fired as CIA Director. It is well-researched and well-written, enough so that I am adding the Patroit Daily News Clearinghouse website to my blogroll on the right.
Essentially the argument is the Goss was sent to CIA in order to squelch the leaks coming out of the CIA that contradicted the White House's scripted story that the errors which Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld used to stampede the U.S. into invading Iraq. PDNC lists the break-downs in the squelching process that have become more frequent this Spring, rather than less as they should if Goss were doing the job he was assigned to do.
The CIA and Cheney are well known to be very much at odds with each other. Then the fact that the CIA and the Intelligence Community was blamed for the so-called "bad Intelligence" the White House used to stampede the nation into attacking Iraq has to be something that long-time CIA people resent. Then there are the actions by the administration to take the entire special operations function from the CIA and center it in the military, down-grading the functions of the CIA. Then the idea that the CIA was the "central coordinating point for Intelligence" has been chipped away at, especially when the CIA lost the job of briefing the President daily. With the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, CIA has been moved even further out of the critical, central loop. Even further, the firing of Mary McCarthy a week before her retirement for what seems to be the sin of donating to a Democratic candidate for President and the set of specific polygraph tests to determine political beliefs threatens to destroy the independence of the CIA. Looking at all this would leave anyone surprised if the members of the CIA had not started to fight back. Goss was clearly supposed to implement the attacks on the agency and prevent the counterattacks.
He has not succeeded, as the recent 60 Minutes interview with retired CIA official Drumheller, the former highest-ranking CIA officer in Europe, clearly demonstrated. It didn't help Goss a bit when retired 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern stood up and asked Sec. Def. Rumsfeld directly why he lied about knowing that Saddam had nuclear weapons and knew they were located at Tikrit. When Rumsfeld denied saying that, McGovern quoted him exactly, leaving Rummy with the egg on his face he so well deserves.
Also on Thursday a former CIA analyst, Paul Pillar, told Spanish language newspaper El Pais that the White House needed to have a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda in order to convince the nation that war was necessary, and since the Intelligence did not support that link, they manufactured it out of lies.
There's more in the diary, along with links to sources which I am not including here. But this shows the outline of the battle between the White House and the CIA. The White House is losing now, and I suspect that Goss is currently being blamed by the White House.
But this is all long term. The sudden and surprise nature of Goss' resignation is still not explained. Friday's resignation could have been a result of the two CIA people who hit the news Thursday piled up on top of Drumheller on 60 Minutes last Sunday. If we assume that Goss was blamed and attacked for failure to control them and just decided to Hell with it - the job wasn't worth keeping, that could be an explanation. But it may have been some other event that occurred in the two or three days before Friday that we don't know about yet, and he decided not to ride it out. The report that "Dusty" Foggo is under investigation by the FBI for improperly awarding agency contracts and is expected to resign next week could well be that final blow. Goss plucked Foggo out of midlevel management in a surprise move to make him third raning man in the CIA, so Foggo's fate is tightly linked to that of Goss. Still, is that enough to explain the timing?
There could also be a relationship to the November election. The many leaks right now could be timed to force Congressional investigations this Summer during the run-up to the election, and firing Goss right now sidetracks that by instead causing nomination hearings with someone who hasn't been in the CIA. If the latter is the case, then the rumored Air Force General who was running the NSA during the warrantless wiretaps does not seem a good choice, so it either won't be him, or it won't turn out the be the effect of hearings on the election.
For some reason I have the old Beachboys line "And she'll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the T-Bird away." running through my head. With emphasis on the "...fun, fun, fun" line, of course. For me this has become the theme for the entire CIA - White House contretemps. I'm enjoying the show, even if (as I am sure is true) the White House and the Republican Party are not.
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