Squabbling Spooks

by digby

Russ Feingold gently suggests that Obama replace all the heads of the intelligence agencies, and for good reason. Get a load of this puerile nonsense:

Barack Obama has been president-elect for barely 10 days but already there are signs of tension among U.S. spy agencies over his intelligence briefings.

The squabbling centers around who should get credit for putting the briefings together and for supplying hot information and penetrating analysis to Obama and his national-security team. According to government officials, some of the more obscure and media-shy agencies worry they are not getting enough recognition for contributions they make to the intelligence outlook provided daily to the administration-in-waiting.


The details of this ridiculous little cat fight are simply unbelievable. I was always skeptical that creating this new Director of National Intelligence was anything more than another expensive redundancy in the already bloated national security apparatus. And so it is.

The good news is that Obama is apparently unlikely to keep any of these jerk-offs:

In approving the post-9/11 law setting up an Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Congress hoped to put an end to the rivalries among the 16 fractious and secretive agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence "community." But the jockeying over the briefings for Obama is a sign that the bureaucratic maneuvering is anything but over. It also leaves open the question of where the agencies will stand—and who will head them—in the incoming Obama administration. Although both McConnell and Hayden expressed a willingness to stay on for some period of time, sources close to the Obama transition say this is unlikely, given that both men zealously defended controversial Bush administration policies—such as the warrantless-wiretapping program—that the incoming Democratic president opposed during the campaign.


Let's hope that's the case, although that last part isn't exactly true, is it?


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