I hate to say it, but one of our highest priorities should be to find a way to replace Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-El Paso) as the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. I don’t want to dislike Rep. Reyes, but he simply is the wrong man for the job. Today we read that Reyes wants to keep Bush’s directors of National and Central Intelligence in place, and that “he also recommended to Obama’s transition team that some parts of the CIA’s controversial alternative interrogation program should be allowed to continue.”
One possible reading of this is that Reyes is merely being polite and he’s just maintaining good relations with the existing Intelligence Community. I understand the game, believe me. But once you start going on about keeping the torture regimen in place, you’ve completely lost me. Even if you think the CIA needs to reserve the right to go beyond the Army Field Manual on occasion, you have to be clear that you renounce torture. Rep. Reyes doesn’t seem to understand the damage that has been done to our reputation under the leadership of McConnell and Hayden and their predecessors.
Rep. Reyes isn’t the brightest crayon in the box to begin with. I think the chair of Intelligence should know that al-Qaeda is not a primarily Shi’ite organization. Rep. Reyes thought that they were as recently as December 2006. It should have disqualified him from taking the gavel a month later, but it didn’t.
Rep. Reyes is going to have the chair in this upcoming Congress, and there’s really nothing we can do about that. But I sure would be interested in supporting someone in the El Paso area who wants to challenge him in a primary. I think a challenger would find a lot of financial support from all over the country. It’s not like Reyes is an unpleasant person or that he doesn’t deliver for his district. This isn’t personal. But we need Democrats that put human and constitutional rights first. Nowhere is that more true than in our Intelligence chairs.
