Whether their plans to attack Iran will amount to anything remains to be seen, but in the meanwhile it seems the Bush neo-con strategists have set their military sights on a new and long-cherished target: the USA.
The pending appointment of General Michael Hayden as director of the Central Intelligence Agency will pave the way for the agency's emasculation and for the Pentagon to assume full authority over paramilitary operations.Josh Marshall says this stuff is genuinely worrisome on a few different levels:
A senior intelligence community official yesterday said the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, has indicated "he is willing to give up covert operations to the Pentagon."...
The proposed change would give the Pentagon unfettered authority to plan and conduct these operations without consulting an intelligence bureaucracy its civilian leaders have deemed hostile to the president's war policy.
First, our whole intelligence infrastructure is being chopped apart and cobbled back together in ways that Congress never envisioned and doesn't appear to be having a chance to sign off on. More immediately troubling is the fact that all our forward-leaning intelligence capacity is being taken over by the Pentagon when it's still being run by Don Rumsfeld, a guy who just about everyone seems to agree now is a demonstrated failure at the job, someone who should already have been fired.
