August 12, 2004
Porter Goss is unfit to lead the Central Intelligence Agency.
And not just because he told Michael Moore he wasn't up to it.
Goss has acted in an intensely partisan manner at a time when the Bush Administration's entire reputation is shot because of its own partisan toying with intelligence.
Back in June, Goss played to the House cameras by bringing onto the floor a poster board with a 1997 quote from John Kerry, who was questioning the growth in the intelligence budget. Goss said, "The Democrats did not support the intelligence community."
Clearly, he was carrying water for the Bush-Cheney campaign. And now they want their water boy to be CIA director.
And as David Corn of The Nation has noted, Goss, as chair of the House intelligence committee, "blocked a House investigation into the embarrassing prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib," as well as one into the ties between the Bush Administration and Ahmad Chalabi.
Goss also refused to denounce, even a year later, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that came out prior to the Iraq War, Corn wrote. The Senate committee had no such problem, saying that "most of the major key judgments" in it were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting."
And I've got another problem with Goss. He was a CIA officer in the 1960s, who worked in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. During that time, the CIA and the U.S. government were involved in unseemly activities in all of those countries. These included propping up Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti and participating in the destabilization and overthrow of democratically elected President Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic in 1963, according to William Blum, author of "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II."
The period from 1961 to 1966 featured "sustained and remarkably gross intervention into the internal affairs of the Dominican Republic by the United States, the likes of which had not been seen in Latin America since the heyday of American gunboat diplomacy," Blum writes.
Before the Senate confirms Goss, it ought to get to the bottom of Goss's record.