Obama’s crippling of the CIA, summed up by Krauthammer

Other than the attempt under Clinton and now Obama to place the health care of every American under the control of government bureaucrats, and the insane comprehensive immigration bills of 2006 and 2007, I don’t know of any development in the U.S. government as concerning and alarming as Obamas’ campaign to disable the CIA, and thus disable America’s ability to protect itself from Muslim terrorists.

The below are comments made by Charles Krauthammer on Fox News last Friday, quoted at NRO.

Even if [Panetta] is nominally in power he is completely marginalized. Juan says it [the infighting within the administration between CIA and Justice] is a civil war. If it’s a civil war, we already have seen Appomattox. It’s over, and Panetta handed over his sword.

Everything he has fought over he has lost, and these aren’t just marginal territorial turf disputes. These are core interests.

Number one, he opposed the release of documents, and twice he lost on that.

Secondly, he opposed the appointment of a prosecutor. Of course, a prosecutor has just been appointed.

And lastly, and most importantly, the interrogation of high-level enemy terrorists has been removed from the CIA. It’s now in the hands of the FBI and White House.

Now, what’s left? Signal intelligence is not CIA, it’s NSA. Human intelligence—any important intelligence—is not CIA anymore. It’s in the FBI and the White House.

So it is Central Intelligence, but it doesn’t gather intelligence. All that’s left is analyzing intelligence. Well, you don’t need $30 billion a year for analysis. You can hire the RAND corporation who will do it at 1/100th of the cost and save billions of dollars that you could waste on the Cash for Clunkers and purchase every secondhand car in America.

This is a real institutional problem…The Obama administration has relegated the CIA to the role it had pre- 9/11. And we know what that resulted in.

Also, on the subject of New Jersey’s determination to keep Kadhafi out during his U.S. visit, Krautahmmaer said something about the UN I’ve never heard a neocon say before:

We have a treaty under which we have to welcome these miscreants.

This is not the first time. It happened with Castro, with Iranian leaders, with PLO leaders. There is only one solution, and that is to terminate the agreement to have the U.N. in the U.S., kick them out, and have them in Kinshasa where they won’t get a lot of press and the damage done in the U.N. will be vastly decreased.…

And it would free up a lot of [New York] parking spaces.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 02, 2009 08:49 AM | Send