Читать книгу How Obama is Transforming America's Military from Superpower to Paper Tiger - Jed Babbin - Страница 5

OBAMA’S WAR AGAINST THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

Nothing will hurt more - or cost more lives sooner - than Obama’s war against our intelligence community.

There is insufficient room here to fully explain that war. A few examples suffice.

One of Obama’s first acts upon taking office was to ban the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) used successfully on al Qaeda bigs during the Bush administration. That action cut off the single most valuable source of intelligence on terrorist activities. Of the EIT program, former CIA Director George Tenet wrote, “What [the terrorist detainees] gave us was worth more than the CIA, NSA, the FBI and our military operations had achieved collectively.” By ending the use of the EITs, Obama has made us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

In pre-confirmation meetings with Republican senators, Attorney General Eric Holder promised he would not seek prosecution of CIA interrogators who had used the EITs. But after a reported profanity-laced screaming match with CIA Director Leon Panetta at the White House, Holder broke that promise.

House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has helped break the bond of trust that must exist between the White House and our spies. Resisting allegations that she had known that waterboarding was being used on al Qaeda terrorists while it was going on in 2002 and 2003, she accused the CIA of lying about briefing her. The CIA subsequently proved it was not lying by releasing summaries of contemporaneous documents. Nevertheless, Pelosi won that battle by refusing to recant her accusation, leading Panetta to write an unprecedented op-ed in The Washington Post.

In it, Panetta said there was “an atmosphere of declining trust, growing frustration and more frequent leaks of properly classified information.” But Obama didn’t support Panetta. Pelosi’s accusation hangs in the air, just like Holder’s ongoing “investigation” of CIA interrogators.

These blows to the CIA’s morale were not healed. Instead, Obama made it worse by imposing perverse priorities on the intelligence agency. A prime example is his decision to make the study of global warming one of its assigned tasks. On Jan. 4, 2010, The New York Times reported that Obama had revived a program that requires the CIA to collaborate with “environmental scientists” to study climate change.

The Obama administration insists that the CIA global warming study is “free,” that it uses only satellite downtime and doesn’t detract from the gathering or analysis of real intelligence information. But that contention is, at best, absurd.

Intelligence satellites - each of which costs upwards of $100 million - have a finite life. Every time they are repositioned, they use fuel that cannot be replaced. And every hour a CIA analyst spends examining radar images of a polar bear’s behind is one less hour spent analyzing information that might reveal where Osama bin Laden is hiding or how close Iran may be to producing a nuclear warhead.

Without the best intelligence and analysis, policy making is mere guesswork. And our intelligence is woefully inadequate.

In August 2006, the Republican staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a special report that severely criticized the CIA and other intelligence agencies for lacking “the ability to acquire essential information necessary to make judgments” on Iran’s nuclear weapon program.

Almost four years later, nothing has improved. Gates, the former CIA director and current secretary of defense, admitted on NBC’s April 11, 2010, Meet the Press that while Iran isn’t now “nuclear capable,” if it gains that capability, we won’t be able to know if it is converting nuclear capability into nuclear arms.

The inescapable inference is that even if the Iranians prove to the world that they are able to build nuclear weapons, we don’t have the ability to know whether or not they are building them. But it’s OK to divert scarce intelligence assets to study global warming.

Every hour a CIA analyst spends examining radar images of a polar bear’s behind is one less hour spent analyzing information that might reveal where Osama bin Laden is hiding or how close Iran may be to producing a nuclear warhead.