Intelligence Turf Wars

Well this is what I was originally going to post on today, before I went to google news and saw the Chavez article.

Anyway....

[begin rant]

I was drinking some coffee and paging through a copy of the Wall Street Journal. On page A4 there is an article titled: Pentagon's Covert Activities Come Under Senate Scrutiny. The gist of the article is that Senator Jay Rockefeller (D - WV) is convening senate hearings on intelligence operations that came out of the Department of Defense post 9/11 that weren't run by the CIA.

Lawmakers plan to study whether the Pentagon obtained the proper authorization for covert operations and notified Congress as required under the law. The inquiry will also explore whether the Pentagon engaged in activities that legally are the responsibility of the Central Intelligence Agency.

This reminded me of a Powerline post from a couple years back: The CIA's War Against President Bush. This article would seem to indicate that the war continues, and now with the Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, making hay for the majority.

Important points from the article:

• Democrats are claiming that Rumsfeld setup a "parallel intelligence network"
• Republican lawmakers prevented "previous efforts" by the then minority from holding hearings
• Democrats will focus on both foreign & domestic operations
  
• Democrats are going to use laws passed during the Iran-Contra affair to attack these activities
• Democrats think that the scope of these laws apply to intelligence operations in Iraq & Afghanistan

I'm afraid I'm going to be quite harsh in my analysis.

The CIA doesn't like the fact that the current administration took steps to ensure that they could perform covert operations that didn't involve the CIA. Thus the CIA has found friends within the ruling Democrats to hold hearings to protect their turf (ah bureaucracy!). I imagine that the quid pro quo was something like, if you protect our turf, we can help you with a few choice tidbits of information to embarrass the President. Nobody, naturally, thinks there is anything wrong with this. This is the great game, right? So now the CIA has invited the vampi.. politicians in to settle the matter. The problem is that the democrats also have an agenda beyond just the pure accumulation of power. They want to end our involvement in Iraq, and it would seem that any methods in the pursuit of this goal are to be utilized. Even if it means hamstringing legitimate operations in pursuit of our common enemy. After all, we want this to be all aboveboard and legal.

So, if we find Osama Bin Laden (or equivalent) somewhere around the world and want to launch an operation against him, the President must file a specific finding against the target beforehand "attesting that it supports specific foreign-policy goals and is important to national security" as well as notifying congressional intelligence committees when a covert action is to be carried out. While on the surface this seems a reasonable process for handling covert operations, I'm afraid that the Democrats are going to claim that all special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan fall under this process. At least that's what they will say from their soapbox, and then point at the administration and say that they are breaking the law (while doing nothing about it) to score more political points.

(sigh)

The only reasons I can fathom for what I perceive to be the Democrat's behavior is that:
a) The Democrats truly believe there is no threat from terrorism abroad
b) The Democrats have made a calculation that our defenses can hold whatever they and the enemy throw at them until they gain control of both the executive and the legislature. At that point they will make the battle against terrorism their war and forever silence their conservative critics that they are weak on defense.

[End Rant;]