CYA CIA Update

I keep meaning to put together a post about all the weird stuff going on at the CIA, but then something new always happens, so it just gets weirder. The latest, of course, is CIA Director Porter Goss's resignation. Speculation about the reasons for his departure was answered fairly quickly by a front-page story in this morning's Washington Post. "Senior administration officials" pretty much blamed Goss's own ineffectiveness as the reason he's no longer there. That would be a reasonable excuse under normal circumstances, I suppose, but the Goss appointment was pegged as more Bush cronyism from the very beginning. He wasn't put into the post because he was expected to be effective, so why should he be drummed out just because he wasn't? How many ineffective people has the Prez kept in their positions regardless of their performance? There's Donald Rumsfeld and Michael Chertoff, for starters. If the administration is going to start firing people for cause, maybe Karl Rove should start getting that resume ready. I don't see that happening, though, so it seems something else is going on here. Maybe it's just nothing more than a power grab by Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte.

It'll be interesting to watch in the coming weeks as the Senate holds confirmation hearings for whoever will replace Goss. They should offer a forum to examine the various covert programs currently in place, even if the domestic spying has been operating from the NSA rather than the CIA. That same Post article suggests that the frontrunner for the position is General Michael V. Hayden, who not so long ago ran the NSA, so the questioning could potentially be just that much more pointed. Of course, this is the same Senate that had a chance to put some tough questions to Sam Alito before granting him lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court but saw fit to preen for the cameras and bloviate instead. Maybe Senate confirmation hearings won't be quite so interesting, after all.