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CIA ex-chief Hayden blames bloggers, congressional aides for damage caused by his policies
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Senior intelligence community hacks like Michael Hayden and his peers are responsible for scuttling senior CIA analyst Phil Mudd’s nomination to the senior DHS intelligence post.
Ex CIA chief Michael Hayden’s opinion piece in the Washington Post on Friday, 19 June 2009, decried how “today’s atmosphere” of mistrust in Washington caused former senior CIA analyst Phil Mudd to withdraw his nomination as Undersecretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence.
Predictably, Hayden did not take responsibility for his own role in “today’s atmosphere”—in particular Hayden's own policies of excessive secrecy and shirking command responsibility for specific programs and policy on his watch.
Hayden nonetheless excoriated “the blogosphere” and chicken-hearted congressional aides for hyping up Mudd’s association with discredited torture and detention practices.
But Hayden does make a worthwhile point when he asserts that the scrutiny focused on Mudd gives pause to current and future generations of intelligence officers.
I count myself as one of those intelligence officers who has reason for pause about future service inside US intelligence. But it’s not cheeto-eating bloggers or opportunistic congressional staffers that I fear.
What I do fear: senior intelligence chiefs’ lack of courage and leadership, which puts junior and mid-level intelligence professionals in legal and political jeopardy with disappointing regularity.
Bloggers and hill staffers—the focus of blame in Hayden’s Washington Post piece—did not fabricate or make up a controversy to sabotage the Mudd nomination. Hayden and others’ aversion to transparency and accountability hobbled Mudd’s chances from the start.
Mudd happened to be near the mysterious, tantalizing “black box” of secrets known to the world outside of CIA as the terrorist detention and interrogation program, responsibility for which lays with Hayden and his predecessors, Porter Goss and George Tenet.
But Hayden, and now his successor, Leon Panetta, have been singularly resistant to answering legitimate inquiries into that black box of detention and torture secrets. As a result, American taxpayers and citizens don’t forthrightly know what Phil Mudd was up to during those first years of fight against Al Qaeda.
Mudd was a CIA analyst, and probably was aware of the torture and detention programs. But he was almost certainly not instrumentally involved in managing or participating in actual torture or extra-judicial detentions. Unfortunately, journalists, bloggers, congressional staffers, and ordinary Americans (all belittled as “internal threats” by Hayden in his Post essay) are not able to precisely discern Mudd’s involvement, if any, with that secret black box of terrorist detention and torture. Even though Americans are entitled to have a say in what CIA is doing in the Republic’s name, Hayden and other CIA directors’ disdain for transparency kept Mudd’s record out of view.
Hayden wielded—and now Panetta wields—the power to face down CIA’s institutional resistance to disclosing details of controversial intelligence programs such as rendition and torture. Instead, Hayden and Panetta have maintained that releasing such information would be damaging to morale and individual employees’ careers.
It’s hard to imagine that the intelligence chiefs’ strategy of drawing out the controversy, instead of courageously laying it to rest, actually boosts morale in CIA hallways. Unfortunately for Mudd and the Department of Homeland Security, stonewalling legitimate inquiries into failed intelligence policies not only kills good will--it also damages loyal intelligence officers’ careers.
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intelligence ·
CIA ·
rendition ·
national security ·
Leon Panetta ·
torture ·
Hayden ·
Mudd
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