The Perfect Storm

Informed Comment

So what are the big security challenges facing the United States in the next decade? They include the regrouping of al-Qaeda and the threat of nuclear proliferation.

What the United States therefore needs most to secure our country is smart, knowledgeable, skilled and dedicated counter-terrorism and counter- proliferation professionals. Without such persons, we are in danger of being hit hard by smart, knowledgeable, skilled terrorists.

But here is the problem. If you are a NOC, you are living a lie. Your very identity as CIA would potentially put everyone around you in danger, especially your friends, contacts and the agents you are running in foreign countries. You yourself could easily be assassinated on a trip abroad if your identity became known.

So you would depend for your survival and for the survival of your friends and contacts on the US government’s willingness and ability to keep your identity secret. If you thought that the vice president might casually betray your identity if he thought it politically convenient to do so, you’d be crazy to put yourself in that position.

So, we’ve had the Plame Wilson affair, the profound hostility of Cheney Inc. to the reality-based CIA (for not going along with its fantasy machine), the Cheney project of blaming CIA director George Tenet for his own mistakes with regard to Iraq, and the changes and rotations in top personnel. Competent Middle East analysts like former Deputy Director of Intelligence Jami Miscik have been forced out.

So ask yourself, how many really smart competent people are going to volunteer to follow in Valerie Plame Wilson’s footsteps and take all those risks for a job that does not pay all that well, knowing that the Cheney sorts might at any moment ruin their lives for petty political reasons?

So Bush and Cheney have deeply damaged recruitment, morale and efforts among our counter-terrorism agencies at the same time that their greedy and duplicitous occupation of a major Arab Muslim country, Iraq, is generating a new terrorist threat against the American homeland. They are creating the perfect storm.