Choices
Bill Richardson could not have hidden grand jury proceedings that took place in August 2008, so the Obama team would have known about them and went ahead anyway. Suggesting that Richardson is to blame for the problem, is the sort of thing the Shrubbery does.
Leon Panetta doesn’t have direct intel experience, but after the way that the Hedgemony has screwed around with the structure of the intel community, he doesn’t need it. All of the decisions that were once made by DirCIA/DCI and the National Security Advisor have been transferred to the Director of National Intelligence, so DirCIA is a bean counter.
Panetta is a budget and organization pro, so maybe he can straighten that mess out after the years of cronyism at the CIA. If the decision is made to restructure the intel community into something more effective and efficient, then you will need intel credentials for the job, but not now.
The complaints of Feinstein and Rockefeller would have a lot more relevance if they had been doing their jobs for the last 8 years instead of going alone to get along.
Sanjay Gupta, MD for Surgeon General‽ Surely they jest‽
Unless there is some unknown treasure chest containing evidence of Dr. Gupta’s management capabilities, as well as, samples of his scholarly undertakings, this is fairly insulting to the medical professionals, and administrative personnel of the Public Health Service. He is qualified to be the media spokesman for PHS, not the head of an organization with 6,000 people.
I have a news flash for the new administration – the American people [the voters, you remember them] are very concerned about health care. This appointment does not reflect any appreciation of the depth of that concern.
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Not to mention that Gupta is against single-payer or any kind of healthcare system reform at all. He is decidedly a status quo type of person. The problem is that the status quo he defends kills thousands of people every year due to lack of timely healthcare or denial of health insurance coverage for serious illnesses. Anybody who defends a system that kills thousands of people per year is as morally unqualified for any position in Washington D.C. as anybody who defends torture. They’re both moral atrocities, and people who defend moral atrocities are beneath contempt and should be consigned to the lowest circles of Hell.
— Badtux the Healthcare Penguin
Badtux´s last blog post..Wednesday happy music blogging
He may just be parroting the corporate line, but I doubt it. He choose to work with the corporate media and has made no attempt to leave. Doing what your bosses want without question is the description of a follower, not a leader.
The position doesn’t require decades of experience, but it does require a track record of leadership and Dr. Gupta doesn’t have it.
Marketing ploys work for campaigns…but it doesn’t fair well in governance.
cookie jill´s last blog post..Delicious Thoughts
This is another Hedgemony tactic of the continuous campaign.
Both sides of the spectrum make the mistake of forgetting that if you win, you have get the garbage picked up and repair the potholes. We may continue the current course in too many areas.
Bryan, my reaction to Gupta was much like yours… and I have a background in public health computing, 10 years at UTSPH and quite a few contracts after that.
Public health as a scientific discipline is only about a hundred years old, and in that time, it has become clear that only governments have the resources to pursue it in practice. So the position of Surgeon General is extremely significant, not merely in promoting good health practices in the population at large, but in managing the handling of epidemics, etc. If Obama were appointing Gupta as PR director for the public health service, I might be OK with that. But he is not the person for Surgeon General.
Ooooh… this is the first time I’ve gotten the dolphin banner. Beautiful! I’ve seen them following a boat I was riding in off Galveston, but after Ike, I’m not even sure that boat still exists…
(How does one choose a different post to show? I don’t really want to link to my post called “Oh, Crap…” but there doesn’t seem to be a way of selecting.)
Steve Bates´s last blog post..Oh, Crap…
There’s a Dr. Gupta that runs a weight loss clinic in the Chicago area and his ads run all the time on radio. So when I heard Obama was choosing Dr. Gupta I thought wtf and broke out in laughter. Then I realized he meant the CNN Dr. Gupta and I was still laughing. Although it was a different kind of laughter. Ugh. Serious medicine as entertainment.
The only Congressional Medal of Honor ever awarded to a woman, and one of the first, was to a Public Health Service doctor, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, in the Civil War. Needless to say the Service has a long and proud history which is not reflected in this choice.
What’s next: the Taco Bell chihuahua to head Commerce?
OT: there’s supposed to be a way, Steve. I’ll check on it.
No big deal, Bryan; save your time. I just thought I was missing something obvious.
Steve Bates´s last blog post..One Rude Son Of A Bar
OK, that’s an added extra, Steve, that would require people to be a registered user at the Comentluv site, and I don’t think that’s a good idea. I am registered too many places already, and am not interested in making people register here.
The guy who sat across from Leon Panetta at the DIA begs to differ on the notion that Panetta has no intelligence experience. Granted, two years as an intelligence analyst at the DIA isn’t exactly a career in intelligence, but it’s enough to know the basics of the business, which is all he needs to know — he has people to handle the details. The fact that Panetta came out early and often against torture and the abuse of prisoners, the fact that he was part of the Iraq Study Group that criticized Bush’s conduct of the war and helped change the public opinion such that it could become fashionable to be against the war, in my opinion is far more important than the fact that he has only two years of intelligence experience. And Diane Feinstein (D-Loves War) as someone who is displeased with the choice of Panetta? Golden!
– Badtux the Intelligent Penguin
Have to agree with you there Badtux (Panetta). 🙂 The advantages outweigh the disadvantages (at least, in so far as I know what they are). 🙂 Especially given what Bryan says about the current State of the ‘US Intel Community’ (short on the ‘Intel’ part, and not much ‘community’ either).
This is about the first choice I’ve heard that Obama has made that is at least somewhat agreeable. *sigh* Of course, what the press (and blogs) say and what actually happens may well be two quite different things. 🙂
At least he has never been associated with the “Company”, which is a very definite plus. There are several different subgroups there, and they don’t get along with each other, much less the rest of the world.
Two years at DIA shouldn’t have warped his mind too badly. They generally tended to their “knitting”, and didn’t get pushy. Different focus than the “Company”, so it isn’t directly transferable experience.
All my time with NSA only qualified me to know I wouldn’t want to work in the CIA.
If he does nothing more than clean up their organizational structure and budgeting process, it will be a huge leap forward and probably be an immense relief to the guys in the field. My impression was there didn’t exist any strong differentiation between administrative staff and operational positions.
Heh… Yeah. 😉 I’ve thought a few times that I’d probably still be with our DIO (kinda like your DIA with a little CIA thrown in). When I joined DIO from DSD (Defense Signals Directorate, sorta NSA equiv) and my time in the SF where I deployed to Cambodia (and some time in Laos, and a couple parts of MidE), it was a good job. Our primary task was to find out who was thinking or plotting naughty things that may harm Aus interests here or abroad. After just over a year, a new broom (who had never even been in the broom closet at DIO or any other agency previously) definitely swept clean! A political appointment. We began being re-tasked to play the role of Southern hemisphere general dogs bodies for the USA and cleaning up the mess after the typical ASIO disasters. It didn’t take me long to get sick of that! I resigned when I was tasked with passing on my hard and painfully earned knowledge, experience, contacts and just about everything else to some bozo’s from ‘the US Company’. I told them to go spend a year in Cambodia and a couple places in Africa for a few years. If they managed to survive (doubtful), they may just learn something. I MOST def wasn’t going to give up my MidE and Russian *contacts* to anyone! I didn’t even give them to the new Director (which was a serious bone of contention with him), so I sure as hell wasn’t going to give them to a couple ignorant yanks just because we were now all kissy-kissy with them! Not the least reason of which is, I probably would have had a tragic accident shortly thereafter.
It really pissed me off the level of ignorance all around about *how things were done*. My ex *friends* (LOL) in Canberra made sure my life was as difficult as possible for years after. But, I have a lot of patience, and made sure I discovered some ghosts and skeletons (with help of people who owed me) and ensured the info would become pubic in the event of any sudden accidents. 🙂 I had learned a lot from my Russian & Arab friends. 🙂 They even offered to pay me handsomely to work for them. LOL At least they respected my decision to stay out of the game, so long as I *really* did stay out! 😉
And no, I am not at all worried about airing this on a public forum. *shrug* I really stopped caring some time ago, and the guilty have either retired, died, or gone AWOL by now (I keep tabs on things).
You know, I trust the Russians & Arabs that I dealt with far more than the Aussies, Brit’s, Yanks, French, Israeli’s I had to deal with. They at least can think into the distant future. *Our side* couldn’t see past next month.The Mossad & Shabak can’t be trusted to tell you the time (or to be accurate if they do), MI5 & 6 will make you and any proof you existed evaporate if it’s easier for them than dealing with you any other way (same for DGSE & DST), the CIA (and most US services) are too incompetent and unreliable to trust (as are our ASIO), our DSD and DIO can be dangerous if they decide you pose a threat, etc. The Russians will hit you if you pose any kind of threat and are of no possible value in the future to them, same with the Arabs. But, if they think you may be of real use in the future… They will keep their end of a bargain (usually). 😉 the Community is nothing if not fluid and dynamic. LOL It’s always curious to me that when people mention ‘Intel community’ or ‘Intel services’, especially in the *dirty games* category… They generally leave out the French (and to a lesser extent, Italians). Perhaps because the French are very good at it. LOL I have greater *respect* for DGSE than Mossad for example.
Well, this is longer and more detailed than I planned. 😉 Maybe I’ll use it in some form as the intro to my *book* (one day, when I know I have six months to live). 😉 LOL
Well, this should annoy a few people. That makes my day! LOL
The Hedgemony has corrupted the system in much the same way, putting political people in intel positions to get the answers they want rather than the facts they need.
Before these clowns took over no one talked about NSA. It wasn’t that its existence was secret, there were signs directing you to HQ and to the Annex. My parking sticker said I worked at the Annex. The thing was that the people didn’t go to parties and hang out with people from “the Village”. You did your job and didn’t talk about it. It was a military outfit.
We had people from different agencies on our aircraft and we didn’t share a lot of information, not because it was prohibited, but because we had different interests. When something came up that was of interest to someone else, you told them about it, but you didn’t share “war stories” that went beyond the shared experience.
Interaction with other groups usually involved equipment and definitely not sources and methods. Processed information was shared through established channels, the raw data almost never was until Reagan came in and made it a practice of using raw data to back up claims about people he didn’t like.
In intel and law enforcement, you never give up sources. You can’t keep sources if they don’t believe you will protect them. It’s a matter of trust, and if you violate trust once, you’ll never get it back. That is the real cost of the Valerie Plame episode – trust was violated to score cheap political points. We lost a network because the people at the top had a fit of pique. You can’t trust Republicans with secrets, it’s that simple. You don’t tell them anything you don’t want on the front page of newspapers.
The Mossad were OK before it became a path to political power, the same with the Italians. After that happened, the switch from policy to politics, neither was worth spit.
The basic problem is that the politicians don’t understand the need to see the world as it is, they want the world to be presented as they believe it to be. They don’t want to know that the Soviets shot down a Korean airliner because Soviet bureaucrats lied about the operational readiness of their radar net, it has to be because the Soviets are evil.
The politicians don’t want to be told that the Soviets have deployed a new aircraft type, because another agency guaranteed that it wouldn’t be ready for two years and you should ignore what is flying off your starboard wing.
Politics should be formulated around reality. Lately, the Hedgemony has been trying to bend reality to fit their politics.
Everyone needs insurance in case of an accident.
All true Bryan… all true. I had the choice of ASIO (I was mostly ignorant at that time of how incompetent they were. I soon learned.) Or DIO. I chose DIO because I believed that being Military rather than civilian made it more professional and I felt comfortable in the Military culture back then. I was angry when it was all politicized eventually, as were many of us. Rules (many unwritten) were being broken simply because the old timers were getting really annoyed and frustrated and being ignored or sidelined, and noobs didn’t have a clue and didn’t care. It was just a theoretical game to them. It seemed to become a global phenomenon during the 80’s & 90’s. And I seriously do not believe that people (even some within the community) realize just how dangerous that is! But I think they are learning, the hard way.
Many of us from *back then* predicted much of what is happening now (not in detail of course). We knew what the breakdown in the *way things are done* and the massive politicization of the Intel services (and even commercialization to some extent) would compromise effectiveness, accuracy etc, and destroy any remaining honor and trust.
Bending reality to fit political agenda’s is now a global problem sadly. It is going to really hurt when it all blows up eventually. The writing is on the wall, and it’s not fading with time.
Afghanistan is going to really hurt the USA and all associated with that debacle (like Aus). The Russians are still paying for that. They have very long memories and don’t forgive or forget. They are patient, strong, cunning and enormously proud. They will have their retribution one day. They may even allow the USA the illusion of *winning* (though Afghan pride might not allow that, still… there are some signs) because they know the USA has a very short attention span and can pay them back in a relatively short time. When the camel dung hits the big ol’ fan… ducking for cover won’t help. 🙂
Blowback is all the Company has generated for years. Bin Laden gets protection because he pays his bills, not because anyone trusts or believes him. Screw up and you have enemies for generations.
The number of idiots who think the Kurds are US allies in some way, don’t know anything about the history of the Kurds, and the number of times that they have been screwed over by the US. They are not going to take chances on our behalf, having been burned too many times believing our promises. They tolerate the US at the moment because it is to their advantage.
These people have no real loyalties, so they don’t understand the concept of honor, which is very important in South Asia and the Middle East. They deal with us the way we deal with them, which is a very ad hoc situation, and nothing to use as a base for long term policy.
Riding into Kabul with the Uzbeks and Tajiks of the Northern Alliance may have been cheap and easy, but it ignored a number of realities and cost us at Tora Bora. We needed Pashtuns and didn’t get connected until later. Even then people failed to understand the importance of tribes, which also screwed up a lot of things in Iraq.
Sometimes you just have to wonder at the monumental stupidity of the so-called developed world.