Leon Panetta, former member of Congress, White House Chief of Staff under President Clinton and U.S. Army veteran has been chosen by Obama as the next Director of CIA. Retired Adm. Dennis Blair has been chosen to be the next Director of Intelligence. These two men are not a product of the intelligence community and that is good. They do have great management skills and that is what our intelligence services need at the present time.
The CIA came into being during President Truman's administration and was prior known as the OSS. The CIA was an intelligence gathering agency with no operational duties under Truman. Eisenhower and other Presidents that followed let CIA get into operations and that is when the intelligence community got out of control.
Over the years congress has had to investigate their wrong doings and found CIA to be involved in illegal activities and out of control. Iraq's so called WMD and the Iran Contra affair should still be fresh in the peoples mind. The director of CIA during the Warren Commission investigation failed to turn over to that committee documents that were important to their investigation.
Mr. Panetta and Mr. Blair will have an opportunity to manage American intelligence and make sure the gathering of intelligence is in line with the President's foreign policy and the standards that make America and its people strong. Panetta and Blair need to make sure intelligence is not manipulated to reach a predetermined outcome.
America should never again have a President and an intelligence community that manipulate intelligence to push a Presidents ideology that commits our men and women in uniform to any action that is unnecessary. Congress should approve both nominations.
No comments :
Post a Comment