Bad Choice

Yeah, I know. Other than possibly Ben Bernanke, what *good* choices has Bush made in terms of nominations lately?

But now that Porter Goss has had to step down from running the CIA (official reason: conflicts with Iran-Contra criminal and current National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Likely reason: neck deep in Hookergate), Bush has made another bad choice to replace him: Gen. Michael V. Hayden.

And it looks like even the Republicans are going to give him a hard time over this one.

The Republicans’ objections center around the idea of having a military guy leading the civilian CIA. But there are so, so many other things wrong with this choice.

For one thing, Hayden has overseen some spectacular failures of intelligence while at the National Security Agency, including 9/11, WMD fuckups, and the NSA wiretapping scandal.

Then there’s his less-than-perfect grasp of civil liberties and the Constitution. As Roxanne reminds us, Gen. Hayden exhibited a complete misunderstanding of the Fourth Amendment in a recent Q & A on the NSA wiretapping program:

QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I’d like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I’m no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American’s right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use —

GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually — the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But the —

GEN. HAYDEN: That’s what it says.

QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.

GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But does it not say probable —

GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says —

QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard —

GEN. HAYDEN: — unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, “We reasonably believe.” And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say “we reasonably believe”; you have to go to the FISA court, or the attorney general has to go to the FISA court and say, “we have probable cause.”

And so what many people believe — and I’d like you to respond to this — is that what you’ve actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of “reasonably believe” in place of probable cause because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief, you have to show probable cause. Could you respond to that, please?

GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn’t craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order.

Just to be very clear — and believe me, if there’s any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it’s the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you’ve raised to me — and I’m not a lawyer, and don’t want to become one — what you’ve raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is “reasonable.” And we believe — I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we’re doing is reasonable.

Wrong, General.

Fourth Amendment — Search and Seizure.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

There’s also the little problem of inexperience with the types of operations the CIA runs and the distrust he would encounter at an Agency already badly damaged during the Bush era:

If General Hayden survives what could be a grueling confirmation hearing, he would arrive as a distinct outsider at a C.I.A. badly bruised by major intelligence failures, drained of many experienced officers and shaken by internal investigations.

In a varied career, General Hayden served in senior intelligence jobs in Germany during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, in South Korea and at the Pentagon. He worked on the National Security Council with Condoleezza Rice, now the secretary of state, under the first President Bush.

Yet General Hayden would start the job with almost no direct experience at the C.I.A.’s central task of recruiting and running foreign agents, the closest analogy being his two years in the 1980′s as a military attaché in the American Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria, trolling for military insights into the Warsaw Pact.As a military officer, he would have to convince the civilian spies that he was not part of a Pentagon plot to take over their agency. And as the principal deputy director of national intelligence, he would very likely be viewed as representing the new central bureaucracy that is resented at the C.I.A. for downgrading the agency’s importance.

That is a remarkable irony of General Hayden’s expected nomination to succeed Porter J. Goss, who announced his resignation on Friday, said Mark M. Lowenthal, an assistant director of the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2005. He said Mr. Negroponte had discovered that he could not perform his dual role of advising the president on intelligence and overseeing all 16 intelligence agencies without more direct control of the formidable assets of the C.I.A. — precisely the advantage enjoyed by the old director of central intelligence, the title abolished when the director of national intelligence job was created last year.

Then there’s the whole Negroponte connection; Hayden has been Negroponte’s top deputy for the past year. A reminder of what Negroponte was up to during the Reagan era:

Before he was the American ambassador to the U.N. from 2001 to 2004 and top official in Iraq for much of the past year, he served as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. It was there that Negroponte – if a wealth of well-corroborated and documented evidence is to be believed – covered up a pattern of gross human rights abuses by the country’s CIA-trained forces. Under Negroponte’s direction, military aid to Honduras rose dramatically, from less than $4 million to $77.4 million. To keep the aid flowing, the American embassy in Tegucigalpa needed to reassure Congress annually that Honduras was not a gross human rights violator. This he did. Negroponte’s 1983 report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for instance, argued that the “Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature” and that there were “no political prisoners in Honduras.”

The snow job worked, and under Negroponte’s watch “U.S. military aid [for Honduras] jumped from $3.9 million in 1980 to $77.4 million by 1984. But in truth, as Sarah Wildman reported in The New Republic, the Honduran army, especially the U.S.-trained Battalion 316, engaged in widespread human rights abuses, including kidnapping, torture and assassination. Negroponte worked closely with the perpetrators and covered up their crimes, according to Ambassador Jack Binns, his predecessor.” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has noted that neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times mentioned Negroponte’s connection to Battalion 316 in the months between Negroponte’s being nominated as U.N. ambassador and his confirmation in 2001.

But let’s not forget the “Iran” part of Iran-Contra, and the fact that the US is engaged in a game of nuclear chicken with Tehran right now. As with the build-up to the Iraq war, evidence of nuclear activity will be very important in building a case — truthful or not — for war. And not only Gen. Hayden, but his boss Negroponte, were involved in the twisted WMD intelligence presented to the UN — where Negroponte was the US Ambassador at the time — prior to the Iraq war.

Now, Josh Marshall and Justin Rood bring us news that Hayden has links to the defense firm at the center of the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal:

Hayden, President Bush’s pick to replace Porter Goss as head of the CIA, contracted with MZM Inc. for the services of Lt. Gen. James C. King, then a senior vice president of the company, the sources say. MZM was owned and operated by Mitchell Wade, who has admitted to bribing former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham with $1.4 million in money and gifts. Wade has also reportedly told investigators he helped arrange for prostitutes to entertain the disgraced lawmaker, and he continues to cooperate with a federal inquiry into the matter.

King has not been implicated in the growing scandal around Wade’s illegal activities. However, federal records show he contributed to some of Wade’s favored lawmakers, including $6000 to Rep. Virgil Goode (D-VA) and $4000 to Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL).

Before joining MZM in December 2001, King served under Hayden as the NSA’s associate deputy director for operations, and as head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

Not that I expect the Democrats to do anything but roll over on this one unless the Republicans put up a fight.