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;]

Well there goes the neighborhood.....

In a move used by dictators since the days of Julius Caesar, Hugo Chavez was:

granted free rein Wednesday to accelerate changes in broad areas of society by presidential decree — a move critics said propels Venezuela toward dictatorship. (source: the AP in the Houston Chronicle)

The article, written by Fabiola Sanchez, proceeds to describe the scene in a "downtown square." There she quotes National Assembly President Cilia Flores: "Fatherland, socialism or death! We will prevail!"

Where to begin?

I understand that there is some standard of objectivity that all journalists are supposed to aspire to. I also understand that after a legislature grants a president "free rein" in a "downtown square" to legislate by proclamation, that a killjoy article about the inevitable glorious society that is about to be realized may have fatal consequences. Somehow I wish that other words were written. Words that reflect the world's last one hundred years of experience dealing with men granted such power by such means.

Here are a few predictions that I fear are certainties, or even realities:

Expect that the political opposition will be quickly eliminated by various means. Some may have already seen the writing on the wall long before today and have already gone into exile. Some brave men and women, will attempt to stand up and speak out. They will go to prison or to the firing line. Chavez seems to idolize Fidel Castro, I'm sure he's already tapped the expertise available there in learning how to control a population. Lenin's bloody hand will reach out from the past century and once again trouble this one.

The enemies of the United States will be granted sanctuary and support in Venezuela. In fact enemies of any free nation in the hemisphere will gain it

Don't expect to hear much out of the press. Every dictator in the past 100 years has seized control of the media in his country. Many also seek to co-opt or coerce foreign media to control their tone, or feed wholesale propaganda back to their home countries. Can anyone name any dictator in the past 100 years who hasn't?

The left will hail the brave new experiment in Venezuela, but it will end in the same bloody shambles that all before it has.

Upset special: Chavez will go after the Scouting movement in Venezuela. Nazi Germany suppressed the scouts. Soviet Russia suppressed the scouts. Something I've noticed about totalitarian regimes is that they always do this in favor of some sort of political indoctrination youth movement.

NRSC Pledge

I've been reading about this online, and while stopping by Hugh Hewitt's site I decided to put my name on the list as well.

It's ridiculous that Congress would send such a message to our enemies. They will conclude that time is on their side. All they have to do is wait, use a few car bombs here and there against an unsuspecting and defenseless civilian population, and the US Congress will strike our colors and run.

I can't imagine, during the height of the V-1 and V-2 attacks against London late in WWII, that Congress would prevent further divisions from reinforcing those already engaged. Especially if those divisions would then help us overrun the launching sites. Why deny the commanders on the ground the resources?