I was so struck by this Conor Friedersdorf tweet over the weekend that I tucked it away for future reference as a prime example of “tweets that sound profound but are actually relatively silly”:
If a CIA director’s affair imperils national security maybe we should rethink the extent to which we rely on and empower the CIA.
— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) November 10, 2012
Now, let’s just unpack this for a sec. What Conor is getting at here, I think, is his normal “Oh man, civil liberties and such!” shtick. If we didn’t, like, conduct drone warfare and murder small children and perform rendition of prisoners and all that stuff then we wouldn’t have to worry about the CIA director opening himself up to blackmail by getting it on with a crazy broad, well, would we?
This is, of course, silliness. There are any number of reasons why having the CIA director open to blackmail could be a disaster, even if we scale back the role of the agency to one that solely collects intelligence. Let’s just use the most basic, obvious example: What if she (or someone else) were to blackmail him for the names of undercover Agency assets? Once those names were obtained, what if this blackmailer then provided those names to the countries being spied upon? One of two things would happen: We’d either lose the asset (either because he or she is murdered or imprisoned for espionage or simply expelled from the country in question) or the asset would be turned against us and used to feed us bad intel. As recent history has shown, bad intel is just about as dangerous as no intel.
I’m sure Conor, who has been keen to note the Obama administration’s myriad failures in the area of disclosure and executive secrecy, understands that the most important issue here is not the CIA’s role in the world but whether or not national security was endangered because pressure was applied to the FBI to push off pursuing the case until after the election. That’s what we should be thinking about here. Some other questions: Did the Obama Administration’s DOJ improperly withhold information about Petreaus’ indiscretions from lawmakers? Did Petraeus (accidentally or otherwise) give this “journalist” information about secret CIA prisons in Libya, as some are now suggesting? What did President Obama know, and when did he know it? If he did not know that his CIA chief had been compromised until last week, why not? If he did know about the issue a month (or two months or two weeks) ago and held off on pushing Petraeus out until after the election, why did he wait? And the real doozy: Did he imperil national security to protect his political aspirations?
Let’s ask some real questions here instead of airily theorizing about the proper role of our intelligence agency in world affairs.
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I noticed a couple of folks saying that Petraeus shouldn’t have resigned due to an affair. They seem to argue that the only reason you resign for an affair is due to its possible blackmail leverage. They don’t seem to consider that his violating his marriage vows and falsifying his security clearance documentation to conceal the affair make him a poor candidate for a security clearance, period.
I’m resigned to the fact that a system of democratically elected representation means that guys like the Choom Gang Leader and John “Ghengis Khan” Kerry get to be in charge of stuff they really shouldn’t even know about, but at least they’ve got voters to support their elevation. Shouldn’t we expect political appointees to meet the same security clearance requirements of, say, Bradley Manning?