Representative Porter Goss endured six and a half hours of questioning during the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearings for his nomination as the new director of central intelligence (DCI), leading up to today's all but preordained confirmation by the full Senate. Democrats ducked a fight they feared would leave them open to GOP charges of obstructionism and disregard for America's security.
Democratic panelists had, however, promised some “tough questioning” of Goss during the hearing, and Senators Carl Levin and Ron Wyden did lead the way in challenging his history of partisanship and feckless oversight as the 7-year chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). They got a few good digs in, to be sure. But there are some more questions that should have been asked before today's confirmation. For example:
- “Congressman Goss, why did you tell reporters in a June conference call that chemical and biological weapons are ‘more dangerous' than nuclear weapons? Can we be assured that this was merely an effort to attack John Kerry's anti-proliferation proposals, or is it actually the case that you will bring to the CIA a policy framework in which nukes are of less concern?”
- “Congressman Goss, what did you mean when you told those same reporters that you weren't concerned about North Korea's active nuclear program because you believed that the United States had ‘called their bluff successfully,' and, thus, that they were ‘not making any progress' on the nuclear-weapons front? U.S. intelligence estimates suggest that North Korea has developed plutonium for six new warheads over the last two years. In what sense does this not constitute progress?”
- “Congressman Goss, some members of Congress have questioned whether or not you're qualified to be the DCI. Some have even gone so far as to say that you lack the qualifications to work for the CIA in any capacity. I'd like your response to one legislator in particular -- namely, Porter Goss from Florida's 14th District, who told the filmmaker Michael Moore earlier this year, ‘I am not qualified … . The things that you need to have, I don't have.' What do you say to Congressman Goss? What can you offer to assuage Congressman Goss' concerns?”
Notice what these questions primarily concern: Goss' competence and his analytical judgment and knowledge of relevant policy issues -- in short, his fitness for the job of CIA chief. This was a point that the Democrats conceded to Goss all too often during the hearing, preferring to attack instead the congressman's partisanship rather than his capabilities.
Partisanship among intelligence officials is certainly an important issue, particularly in this era of maximum feasible politicization of policy analysis, and Goss has unquestionably shown a fierce partisan bite in the past. Forget, for a moment, his recent Cheney-esque broadsides against Kerry -- just listen to how his HPSCI colleague, Democrat Rush Holt of New Jersey, describes the committee under Goss' leadership: the HPSCI, Holt told The American Prospect, “has probably been less functional than it was previously. … When I first arrived on the committee [two years ago], I had the sense that it was a bipartisan committee -- that is the reputation that it had had. It hasn't been during most of the time that I've been on it.”
The litany of dubious party-line decisions made by the majority in the last year -- reneging at the last minute on an agreement with the minority to hold an open hearing on the Valerie Plame case, calling for the declassification of Richard Clarke's congressional testimony in an effort to discredit him, punting on the Abu Ghraib scandal -- has served to poison relations within the HPSCI and infuriate the normally consensus-minded, mild-mannered ranking member, Jane Harman. The fact that Goss has so readily served as “a pit bull for the administration” (to use the words of one Democratic staffer quoted by The Hill in July) obviously casts doubts on his prospective independence as a CIA chief.
That said, it hardly seems impossible to imagine that a once fiery congressman could manage to switch tacks and become an effective nonpartisan agency chief. The real problem is that Goss' hackery may overshadow his genuine foolishness on matters of crucial significance to U.S. intelligence and national security.
Indeed, it may be that one source of the Democrats' difficulties in articulating a coherent case against Goss is the overabundance of reasons that he's a bad choice: There are questions of partisanship, questions of competence, and questions of temperament. The reasons bleed into one another; they grow inextricable and difficult to highlight in isolation. Does Goss make ridiculous statements because he's a hack, or because he's incompetent? Does he fall asleep at the wheel of oversight out of fealty to the White House, or because of fundamentally poor leadership qualities?
Consider the matter of the HPSCI's investigation into prewar Iraq intelligence. When the Senate Intelligence Committee released its massive, scathing report in July, the question presented itself: What of the committee's House counterpart? When would the HPSCI release its weapons-of-mass-destruction report?
“Who knows? It will get done,” was Goss' shrugged response to reporters in July. Over the spring, Democratic members had become increasingly outspoken in their outrage over Goss' foot-dragging, even threatening in March to release a minority report if the majority refused to move forward. (Indeed, one Democratic source on the committee now says a minority report on prewar intelligence is likely to be released this fall.) Harman sent four unanswered letters to Goss in the spring requesting that the committee begin work on a report before the chairman bothered to acknowledge her requests in person.
Holt describes his committee's yearlong inquiry into Iraq intelligence bluntly. “HPSCI's review of these intelligence failures has been characterized by its nonexistence,” he says. “Holding some hearings where we asked some people some questions … would I call that a review? No.”
The chairman's assurances to the press that matters were moving forward this summer underscored a particularly Goss-ian combination of cluelessness, poor leadership, and dishonesty; the comparative significance of each quality was, as always, difficult to discern. “As far as I know, our staffs are working together and we are on our timetable,” Goss said in July. Holt begs to differ. “There was no time that I know of,” he said, “where the staff majority and minority -- or the members, majority, and minority -- got together and said ‘Here are the unanswered questions, here's our strategy for getting the answers to those questions.'”
In any event, Goss had long ago narrowed the inquiry's focus to the politically safe, technical question of adequacy of resources for prewar intelligence gathering. This decision determined the direction in which the majority staff would take its work. Goss has made it clear that he believes Clinton-era funding cuts for human intelligence constitute the prime culprit in the prewar intelligence failures on Iraq -- not skewed analysis, not hyped or cherry-picked use of the intelligence by the administration. This is not a belief that is echoed by his GOP counterparts on the Senate Intelligence Committee, let alone by the minority panelists on his own committee.
Does Goss really believe it, or is this just more hackery meant to provide the administration cover? Really, which would be worse?
Consider that after David Kay gave the HPSCI a classified briefing in the fall of 2003 detailing his team's failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, Goss sent out a press release declaring that Kay's briefing makes it “clear that the threat Saddam [Hussein] presented to the region and to the world was real, growing, and grave,” and that “the intelligence regarding Iraq's [weapons of mass destruction] was properly used and is being properly used today. There continues to be no indication that anyone was misled by the intelligence analysis.” It's bad enough for Goss to spout such nonsense for partisan purposes, but wouldn't it be worse if this future CIA chief drew those conclusions sincerely from Kay's briefing?
So is Goss a feckless steward because he's a partisan or because he's actually feckless? Does he make foolish observations and assessments because he's a hack or because he's actually a fool? These are the unhappy judgment calls we're left to make about the man our president has nominated to be the next director of central intelligence -- and who is widely expected to be tapped for the even more powerful national intelligence director post if that position is created and Bush is re-elected. As the first major change in this season of sweeping intelligence reform, Goss' confirmation is a dubious beginning.
Sam Rosenfeld writes for the Prospect's online edition.
