Last week, I posted a T.D. Allman/Rolling Stone article about Dick Cheney’s corrosive ability to turn everything he touches into disaster.
Well, with the Middle East going to hell in a handbasket (and President Bush having to hurry home from the G-8 Summit in order to have a photo-op with Boy Scouts), we should not forget Bush’s talent in matching Cheney’s destructiveness act for act. Do not let George (national security is my ouevre) Bush’s bungling selection of the incompetent Porter Goss as CIA chief go gentle into that good night. Luckily, Ken Silverstein of Harper’s Magazine is there to remind us with this, which ends on yet another ominous note involving U.S. national security again being used as political policy:
Ken Silverstein
Harper’s
July 17, 2006.
When Joseph Stalin took power in the former Soviet Union, his regime not only physically eliminated his political opponents but also sought to remove any photographic record of their existence. The most famous case was that of Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s chief rival, who was assassinated in Mexico in 1940 and who before that had been airbrushed out of official photographs.
A similar (if much less bloody) purge is now underway at the CIA, where new director Michael Hayden is systematically seeking to eliminate any evidence that his predecessor Porter Goss, whose stewardship is widely considered to have been a disasterever ran the agency.
By now, most of the people Goss brought in to senior positionsa group known derisively as the Gosslingsare long gone. That includes Goss’s hatchet man, chief of staff Patrick Murray, as well as several aides whose names have surfaced in connection with the Duke Cunningham scandalmost notably Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the agency’s former executive director. (Foggo’s end came soon after FBI agents raided his office and home two months ago.)
Now it seems that the last of the Gosslings are being targeted for extermination. Last week, it was announced that Jennifer Millerwise, the spokeswoman Goss brought over with him from Capitol Hill, was leaving for a job in the private sector. The agency, a source told me, is likely to replace Millerwise with Mark Mansfield, who served as spokesman under George “Slam Dunk” Tenet.
More significantly, I’m told that Michael Kostiw, senior adviser to Goss, is also being pushed out. Kostiw was the only Gossling that was thought to have performed well, and a number of senior agency officials urged Hayden to keep him on. However, the source told me, Kostiw ran afoul of Hayden’s boss, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. It appears that Kostiw’s grim assessment of the situation in Iraq, where he traveled regularly over the past several years, displeased Negroponte, who “wasn’t happy with his criticism,” said the source. “He said [Kostiw] wasn’t being supportive enough of the policy…”
Ken Silverstein article: http://tinyurl.com/n7vx8
Ken Silverstein bio: http://tinyurl.com/ldp28
