President Bush has (unsurprisingly) picked Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL) to be the next head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Goss was probably #1 on the short list for the position as he’s a former CIA agent who knows many of the ins and outs of the US intelligence community.
He’s going to have one of the toughest jobs imaginable, given that the CIA has suffered from years of budget cuts and restrictive regulation that have ensured that those places where we have the most urgent need for HUMINT resources are the least likely places for us to be able to gather those sources. Goss is going to need to institute sweeping changes to the entrenched bureaucracy of the CIA in order to make things work. It’s going to be a difficult job, and likely thankless, but hopefully Goss has the chops to make sure that our intelligence capabilities match the many threats we face.
During the making of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore interviewed Porter Goss, who Bush recently tapped to run the CIA. What did Porter Goss say then regarding his qualifications?
“It is true I was a case officer, clandestine services officer, and yes, I do understand the core mission of the business. But I couldn’t get a job with the CIA today. I am not qualified. I don’t have the language skills. You know, my language skills were romance languages and stuff. We’re looking for Arabists today. I don’t have the cultural background probably, and I certainly don’t have the technical skills, as my children remind me every day. “Daddy, Daddy, you gotta get better on your computer.” And so the things you need to have, I don’t have.”
The video is located at http://www.michaelmoore.com/_media/qt/goss_2.mov.