{"id":814,"date":"2005-03-05T12:21:36","date_gmt":"2005-03-05T16:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=814"},"modified":"2005-03-05T12:21:36","modified_gmt":"2005-03-05T16:21:36","slug":"negroponte-the-gatekeeper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=814","title":{"rendered":"Negroponte, The Gatekeeper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ray McGovern<\/a> reflects on the way things were done when he served the White House and has some questions about John Negroponte’s new role as the first director of national intelligence:<\/p>\n

We were there to tell it like it is and, perhaps best of all, in those days we had career protection for doing so. And so we did. If, for example, one of those senior officials asked if there was good evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we knew that professional analysts we trusted thought not, we would say “No sir.”<\/p>\n

But, you ask, “Even if the director had said it was a ‘slam dunk?'” Yes. Even after the director had said it was a slam dunk. But bear in mind that in those days the task was not so heroic. We did not have the director looking over our shoulder.<\/p>\n

The president’s assertion that his “primary briefer” will be Negroponte ? the man farthest removed from substantive intelligence analysis, not to mention from the sourcing and other peculiarities of the PDB articles chosen for a given day ? is cause for concern. Is the director of national intelligence to be super-analyst as well as intelligence czar reigning over 15 intelligence agencies? Will he not have other things to do in the morning?<\/p>\n

President Bush reportedly does not read the President’s Daily Brief, but rather has it read to him. Will Negroponte choose which items to read on a given day? Who will do the actual reading? Will Goss be there? Does he, too, not have other things to do in the morning? Will there be a senior analyst there, with career protection, should it be necessary to correct Negroponte when he attempts to answer the president’s questions?<\/p>\n

And, with Negroponte as gatekeeper, who else will get an early-bird crack at the president? Is it likely that courtiers\/partisans like Elliot Abrams will be there to “help” at the PDB briefings? And who is the president more likely to listen to concerning, say, the status of Iran’s nuclear program?<\/p>\n

It is impossible to overstate how much rides on the answers to those questions. Someone should tell President Bush to listen to what his earthly father has to say on all this. He knows.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d like to know why McGovern seems so certain George Sr. doesn’t support this new way of doing things 101%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ray McGovern reflects on the way things were done when he served the White House and has some questions about John Negroponte’s new role as the first director of national intelligence: We were there to tell it like it is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-d8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}