Miniter's Notebook

But the Standard writer too easily glides over something that is harder to forgive: Why is a former CIA official giving the official Democratic party response? What happened to the tradition of intelligence officers and military leaders being non-partisan? What happened to the old ideal in which registering to vote and actually voting made one appear to be "a bit political"—and that wasn't seen as a good thing by peers. Now it is perfectly normal for intelligence officials like Michael Scheurer to write books attacking the current Administration, while it is at war, and for others to act as spokesmen for a political party? Sure, you might say, they are citizens and entitled to their free speech. True. But consider what happens when the intelligence or military establishment takes on a partisan viewpoint (even if it is a conservative Republican one). If it shares the view of the White House, it doesn't provide the kind of intellectual tension that sharpens analysis and sees ahead of the curve. Alternatively, if it opposes government policy, then it leaks to the press and to the opposition as many early drafts of damaging documents as it can in the hopes of either defeating the Administration in the next election or ruining the careers of its best-known members. The Valerie Plame episode is just one of several recent CIA-related scandals that in some way was set in motion by the agency. (Who asked them to send Amb. Wilson to Niger anyway?) In the worst case, you get something akin to Madrid, in which the intelligence service leaked information to the opposition Socialist party—hours or days before it was seen by the sitting prime minister. As a result, Aznar went public with outdated information and could be successfully attacked for "lying" about or "covering up" things he was not told yet. (See the last chapter of my book Shadow War for more details.) Somehow CIA director Porter Goss and other intel chiefs have to depoliticize the services or else the intelligence community really will become the secretive cabal against democracy that its most left-wing critics fear it is.