sisyphusshrugged

Well, we had no warning that this president doesn't know how to learn from mistakes, right? Since he hasn't made any?

Like, the foreign policy which got us into an unsustainable posture of unilateral aggression we can't afford and don't have the manpower to sustain

By accepting Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's resignation, President Bush appears to have taken a decisive turn in his approach to foreign policy.

Powell's departure -- and Bush's intention to name his confidante, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, as Powell's replacement -- would mark the triumph of a hard-edged approach to diplomacy espoused by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Powell's brand of moderate realism was often overridden in the administration's councils of power, but Powell's presence ensured that the president heard divergent views on how to proceed on key foreign policy issues.

But, with Powell out of the picture, the long-running struggle over key foreign policy issues is likely to be less intense. Powell has pressed for working with the Europeans on ending Iran's nuclear program, pursuing diplomatic talks with North Korea over its nuclear ambitions and taking a tougher approach with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Now, the policy toward Iran and North Korea may turn decidedly sharper, with a bigger push for sanctions rather than diplomacy. On Middle East peace, the burden for progress will remain largely with the Palestinians.

Moreover, in elevating Rice, Bush is signaling that he is comfortable with the direction of the past four years and sees little need to dramatically shift course. Powell has had conversations for six months with Bush about the need for a "new team" in foreign policy, a senior State Department official said. But in the end only the key official who did not mesh well with the others -- Powell -- is leaving.

or the executive culture which ruthlessly punished anyone in Washington who tried to point out over the din of hosannas from appointed yesmen that we were working from disastrously false premises in Iraq

Hours after the two top clandestine service officers at the CIA resigned yesterday, Director Porter J. Goss asked employees to remain loyal to the agency and rebutted allegations that he had a partisan agenda.

"We provide the intelligence as we see it and let the facts alone speak to the policymakers," Goss wrote in an internal e-mail to CIA employees, according to two people who read it to The Washington Post...

...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said yesterday that Goss and some White House officials were concerned that unauthorized disclosures of information by the CIA during the election campaign "were intended to damage the president," and he accused a "rogue" element within the agency of carrying them out.

Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, yesterday accused Goss's aides of having partisan motives. Targeting officials in the clandestine service, whose job is to manage CIA operations around the world, for leaks of a prewar National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "totally misguided," she said.

The two resignations yesterday, of Deputy Director of Operations Stephen R. Kappes and his deputy, Michael Sulick, will "undermine the morale of the workforce that had undergone a renaissance since the failures of 9/11," she said.

...

Kappes is a widely respected officer who helped persuade Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi to renounce weapons of mass destruction this year. Sulick, whose career includes assignments in South America, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, headed the agency's counterintelligence center until becoming Kappes's deputy. Both are highly regarded by clandestine service colleagues, said 10 former CIA officials who worked with them.

Also last week, the agency's deputy director, John E. McLaughlin, retired.

The personnel moves follow a series of confrontations between Goss's new chief of staff, Patrick Murray, and senior operations staff members.

Last week, Murray demanded that Kappes fire Sulick after Sulick criticized Murray at a meeting, according to several current and former CIA officials. Kappes declined and offered his resignation. McLaughlin announced his retirement, and several other senior operations officers have threatened to resign, the current and former officials said.

Goss's internal e-mail also attempted to calm fears that Murray has wide-ranging authority and that Goss intends to dilute the power of the directorate of operations. Last week, Murray told managers that the directorate will lose its key role in appointing station chiefs and regional division chiefs, according to several current and former employees.

For those of you keeping score at home, that's a former congressional aide with no experience in large scale personnel management or in intelligence operations taking over operational control of US intelligence and demanding that a senior official with years of operational experience be fired for criticizing him in an internal meeting.

But then, criticizing Murray is practically like criticizing Bush, isn't it?

Then of course there's Homeland Security, where they've been having a little trouble in the area of providing Homeland Security. They've decided to deal with their troubles by demanding that employees - and Congress - sign a nondisclosure agreement for non-classified but awkward material (keep in mind that Homeland Security employees already do not enjoy whistleblower protection)

The Department of Homeland Security is requiring thousands of employees and contractors to sign nondisclosure agreements that prohibit them from sharing sensitive but unclassified information with the public.

The department was rebuffed, however, when it also tried to require congressional aides to sign the secrecy pledges as a condition for gaining access to certain materials, majority and minority spokesmen for the House Select Committee on Homeland Security said yesterday.

DHS spokeswoman Valerie Smith said in an interview that all 180,000 employees and contractors are being required to sign the three-page forms as part of working for the agency, a policy formalized in May. State and local security officials are asked to sign the statement for classified information only.

Smith said the agreements do not exempt underlying information from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. Signers are given the form "simply to inform and educate them about the sensitivity of that information and the need to protect it. . . . It does not do anything to further obscure or shroud that information," she said.

But congressional critics and government watchdog organizations such as the Federation of American Scientists call the policy a potentially precedent-setting expansion of official secrecy whose provisions are overly broad and unworkable, if not unconstitutional.

Ken Johnson, spokesman for House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), said GOP aides have been approached by DHS officials as a group and individually. One junior aide contacted directly signed the agreement, but his supervisors and Cox repudiated it as soon as they found out.

"We have steadfastly refused to sign any nondisclosure agreements. From our perspective it would be inappropriate, and at the very least unnecessary," Johnson said. "This is unclassified material and Congress has a right to it without signing away our lives."

Democratic staff also refused to sign nondisclosure agreements, minority committee spokeswoman Moira Whelan said.

"They're forgetting who's overseeing who," another panel official said.

Steven Aftergood, editor of the federation's newsletter, which reported the policy last week, said the DHS is sweeping whole categories of government information under restrictions previously used only for classified data. Such categories include "official use only" and "law enforcement sensitive."

I like the touch about the FOIA. We'll never know that the information exists, but if somehow we happen on it and figure out where it's kept, we can file FOIA requests and except for the knock on the door when they come to find out who told us, we're home free.

Couldn't work up any enthusiasm about Kerry? Some of his supporters just needed taking down a peg?

Well, the thirty percent of Bush voters who had some vague idea of what's been going on this past four years got precisely what they voted for.