comrade igwe
JF-Expert Member
- Jan 12, 2015
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Rais wa Marekani Mh Donald John Trump amemteua na kuthibitishwa na bunge la congress ndugu Mike Pompeo kuwa Mkurugenzi Mkuu mpya wa shirika la Ujasusi wa mambo ya nje la Marekani yaani CIA
Aidha, Mkurugenzi Mkuu alieondoka kamanda John Brennan alikasirishwa na tabia ya Mh Rais Trump kwenda kutumia muda mwingi kuwahutubia Maafisa wa CIA katika ukumbi wa Memorial na kutumia muda mwingi kuponda vyombo vya habari na kutangaza vita na baadhi ya vyombo vya habari kwa habari anaziita za uzushi, John brennan hakuficha chuki zake baada ya Rais kuwafuata CIA.
Trump's New Clean Up Man at the CIA
CIA director Mike Pompeo will learn that the agency is not kind to interlopers from Capitol Hill
Mike Pompeo, CIA director
Photo Credit: YouTube
Mike Pompeo, Republican congressman from Benghazi (I mean Kansas) was confirmed as director of the Central Intelligence Agency on Monday. The 53-year-old former Congressman is walking into a bureaucratic whirlwind, the likes of which Langley has not seen since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Pompeo now has nominal control of one of the powerful and controversial components of the U.S. government, which his patron, the President of the United States, has alternately denigrated and embraced in recent weeks. The new director has the unenviable task of explaining to his new colleagues that Trump really didn’t mean it when he blamed outgoing director John Brennan for leaking an unverified dossier on Trump to the media and insultingly compared the CIA to “Nazis.”
Pompeo will also have to live down Trump’s astonishingly oafish appearance at the CIA headquarters on his first day in office. On Saturday, the new president used the agency as his prop for a television appearance in which he misrepresented the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Just days after insulting the CIA leadership, Trump told the assembled personnel, along with a claque of cheering outsiders, that “there is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump.”
On Sunday CBS News quoted unnamed senior Agency officials as saying they were “uncomfortable” with Trump’s antics. On Monday press secretary Sean Spicer denied that the White House had installed his supporters in the front row of the auditorium where Trump appeared. Within hours, CBS News quoted CIA officials confirming that Trump had indeed packed the hall.
Such public hostility to the CIA is unprecedented and no doubt disturbing to the clandestine bureaucracy at the heart of what has been dubbed “the deep state” or “the double government.” The fact that the senior CIA officials were leaking information about an incoming president on his second day in office does not bode well for Pompeo’s job security.
And cleaning up after the president’s verbal poop is not the biggest of the Pompeo’s challenges. The CIA is a $14.7 billion a year agency that is historically unfriendly to directors who have not risen through its ranks.
The last congressmen who parachuted into Langley was hapless Florida Representative Porter Goss, appointed by President Bush in 2004 to succeed the disgraced George Tenet. Goss, a former operations officer who never held a senior management position in Langley, lasted less than two years. He was shown the door after being outmaneuvered by John Negroponte, the first Director of National Intelligence (DNI).
Conspiracy Theorist
Pompeo brings a certain intelligence and indecent tenacity to the job. As a West Point cadet, he was first in his class. As a Tea Party congressman he lead the charge against Secretary of State Hillary Hillary Clinton for her handling of the September 2012 attack on U.S. diplomats in Libya. When the family of slain ambassador Christopher Stevens said his death of should not be politicized,Pompeo ignored them.
He also brings a skepticism about climate change that is not shared by the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community. When asked about climate change during his confirmation hearings Pompeo said "my role is going to be so different and unique from that."
Such indifference to fact does not bode well for Pompeo’s tenure in Langley. Say what you will about the CIA, careless thinking and partisan politicking are not prized in Langley. Whether agency personnel are engaged in the black arts of clandestine action (ranging from interfering in democratic elections to assassinating jihadists or a U.S. teenager) or in the dispassionate analysis of key policy issues (ranging from the real threat of climate change to the realiy of Iran’s nuclear ambitions), they believe in the supreme value of intelligence--facts distilled into useful and actionable information.
Unfounded conspiracy theories are a menace to the agency’s credibility, power, and budget. The agency’s critics sometimes forget that Tenet came to the agency as an outsider. He had previously served as staff director at the Senate Intelligence Committee. They also forget that Tenet’s “slam dunk” belief in the bogus neoconservative conspiracy theory of Saddam Hussein’s WMD was not universally shared. The career analysts who saw no evidence of Iraqi WMD were overruled by a director from Capitol Hill eager to curry favor with a polarizing Republican president.
Pompeo inherits the burden of this institutional memory. Tenet’s folly not only justified the moral and geopolitical catastrophe of the Iraq war. It also proved a bureaucratic setback for the agency. Within two years, Tenet was gone, and Congress had created the DNI position, which ended the CIA’s primacy among U.S. intelligence agencies.
Now the agency is threatened again.Trump and his DNI, retired general Michael Flynn, have floated a plant to reorganize the intelligence community at the CIA’s expense.Then the thoroughly unreliable press secretary Spicer deniedthere was any such plan.
The coherence and reality of Trump’s CIA plans are open to doubt. Unlike in 2004, there is no great appetite on Capitol Hill for remaking the CIA, even among Republicans. Amid the Trumpian turbulence, Pompeo may be able to live down his own reputation for partisanship. But he will he hard pressed to dispel the perception that is boss is an unintelligent, and perhaps unstable, man and a menace to the agency’s core missions of covert operations and policy analysis.
Both Pompeo and Trump are already floundering on the hard shoals of Washington political reality: Presidents and their dreams of taming Langley come and go, while the CIA endures.
