Yeah, I think David and Kevin have it just right. The Post buried the lede in its piece today on the continuing fall out from the firing of CIA officer Mary McCarthy.
Says the Post in the second to last graf …
The White House also has recently barraged the agency with questions about the political affiliations of some of its senior intelligence officers, according to intelligence officials.
CIA officers don’t work under the same civil service rules as most government employees. But I still don’t think this sort of political purge activity is permitted.
Not that we should be surprised about this. When Porter Goss took over as DCI he brought over with him a number of GOP political operatives. Take the CIA head of Public Affairs Goss installed: Jennifer Millerwise Dyck. She was a flack from the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign. Before that she worked for Goss on the Hill. And before that she worked for Ari Fleischer at the House Ways and Means Committee.
The administration’s response to the ills of the intelligence agencies has been to further politicize them, to put them under more reliable political control. And that’s not surprising either since, from the White House perspective, the failures of the intelligence agencies weren’t not getting it right on WMD and other issues. It was getting it more right and then wrong and then talking about what had happened to the press.
Now as the consequences of their policies grow more severe and catastrophic and the news gets worse and worse, it’s batten down the hatches time. We should be surprised that a deeper purge is underway.
Just because the White House was trying to root out all but loyalists that doesn’t mean they didn’t catch McCarthy in a fireable offense. I don’t know. But this latest abuse of power from the White House deserves much more than a passing reference.
