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Impeach George Bush
Democrats Give Domestic Spyer A Pass
So much for speaking out. So much for watching out for the common man. So much for the opposition party, folks.
Source: NY Times, 2006-05-19
Candidate: Democratic Party
WASHINGTON, May 18 — Gen. Michael V. Hayden sought on Thursday to distance himself from the Pentagon and its role in prewar intelligence on Iraq, in an appearance that put him on track to win swift confirmation as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In a confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, General Hayden appeared in the pristine blue uniform he has worn for 36 years as an Air Force officer.
But he repeatedly professed his independence from the Defense Department and its leadership, saying he had been "uncomfortable" with the work of a Pentagon intelligence office run by Douglas J. Feith, a former undersecretary of defense, which asserted in the months before the Iraq war that Iraq had established ties with operatives for Al Qaeda in the Middle East.
General Hayden also recounted disagreements with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about the Pentagon's control over a large part of America's annual intelligence budget. In characterizing one such conversation, he said, "I think it's what diplomats would call that frank and wide-ranging exchange of views."
General Hayden flatly defended as legal the secret domestic eavesdropping program he ran until last year as director of the National Security Agency, and that argument was directly challenged by only a handful of Democratic senators.
But he notably declined to endorse a Bush administration stance that has severely limited the number of senators who could be briefed on the program. "It was not my decision," he said.
The questioning of General Hayden in more than seven hours of public testimony included moments of tension. But, for the most part, Democrats as well as Republicans praised his experience and said he was a good choice to lead an agency that has been buffeted by recriminations over intelligence failures and the stormy service of its current director, Porter J. Goss, who will leave next week.
None of the 15 senators on the committee indicated that they planned to vote against General Hayden's nomination. By day's end, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Republican chairman of the committee, said he hoped to hold votes in the committee and the full Senate next week that could install General Hayden at the C.I.A. by Memorial Day.
General Hayden's assertions of independence appeared intended to address his critics' concerns that a four-star general running the spy agency might be too beholden to the Pentagon at a time when the military is expanding its foreign intelligence operations.
In his current job, as principal deputy to John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, General Hayden is not in the direct military chain of command. Yet his testimony on Wednesday was the first time that a senior general on active duty had criticized the intelligence office run by Mr. Feith, who left the Pentagon last year after overseeing a critical part of the Pentagon's effort to build the case for war against Saddam Hussein.
In stark contrast to Mr. Goss, who in confirmation hearings 19 months ago pledged "tough love" for the embattled agency, General Hayden went out of his way to praise the work of C.I.A. officials and pledged to "reaffirm the C.I.A.'s proud culture of risk-taking and excellence."
General Hayden, who would become the third C.I.A. director in two years, said he was also eager to restore a sense of continuity at the agency, which has been shaken by turnover at its highest levels. He said the possible return of Stephen R. Kappes, a veteran of the agency's clandestine service who is said to be the leading candidate to become General Hayden's deputy, would help in that effort.
"You get a lot more authority when the work force doesn't think it's amateur hour on the top floor," he said. "You get a lot more authority when you've got somebody welded to your hip whom everybody unarguably respects as someone who knows the business."
He said he also believed it was "time to move past what seems to me to be an endless picking apart of the archeology of every past intelligence failure and success," including those related to the Sept. 11 attacks and faulty assessments about prewar intelligence on Iraq. C.I.A officers, he said, "deserve not to have every action analyzed, second-guessed and criticized on the front pages of the morning paper."
The sharpest criticism from senators came during questions about General Hayden's role in the domestic eavesdropping program. General Hayden said the surveillance program broke no laws and had been carefully vetted by National Security Agency lawyers. He said no lawmaker had ever suggested significant changes to the program in more than a dozen classified briefings before it was publicly revealed in December.
"I never left those sessions thinking I had to change anything," he said.
Yet some lawmakers challenged whether General Hayden had been upfront about the highly classified program in public statements and in past visits to Capitol Hill.
One committee Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, questioned whether General Hayden had "simply said one thing and done another, or whether you have just parsed your words like a lawyer to intentionally mislead the public."
Mr. Wyden asked, "What's to say that if you're confirmed to head the C.I.A., we won't go through exactly this kind of drill with you over there?"
"Well, senator," the general replied, "you're going to have to make a judgment on my character."
While several senators expressed concern that the Pentagon was muscling onto the C.I.A.'s territory by expanding its intelligence capabilities, General Hayden denied that there was a turf battle between the military and civilian intelligence operatives.
In fact, General Hayden said on several occasions Thursday that Pentagon intelligence-gathering had helped the C.I.A. break free from the military's constant demands to support troops with tactical intelligence.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, General Hayden said, the C.I.A. had initially "picked up a large burden" in providing direct support to military forces.
"To have D.O.D. step up to those kinds of responsibilities doesn't seem to me to be a bad thing," he said. "And if that frees up C.I.A. activity to go back toward the more traditional C.I.A. realm of strategic intelligence, there's a happy marriage to be made here."
At the same time, General Hayden said it was necessary to "create a bright line" distinguishing the field activities of the Pentagon and the C.I.A., which historically has had broader legal authority to run covert operations overseas.
He said his first priority was to strengthen the C.I.A.'s abilities to collect human intelligence, yet he also said the spy agency needed to remain the government's "center of excellence" for intelligence analysis.
At the same time, he said the C.I.A.'s workforce of analysts, known as the directorate of intelligence, suffered from a lack of seasoned veterans who could coach the younger analysts who had joined the agency since the Sept. 11 attacks.
To illustrate this, General Hayden said that for every 10 analysts at the agency with less than four years of intelligence experience, there was only one with more than 10 years of experience.
"This is the least experienced analytic workforce in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency," he said.
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