Leaders need dissenting voices :Greeley (Excellent read)

[jbfam4]

Leaders need dissenting voices

July 23, 2004

BY ANDREW GREELEY

http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel23.html



The only way to avoid disastrous mistakes by intelligence agencies is to legitimate and encourage adversarial voices -- men and women who argue vigorously that a policy decision is wrong (as did the tiny and unheard State Department intelligence unit to whom even Secretary Colin Powell did not listen). Indeed, these men and women must be ex officio obligated to present the opposite case, so that their careers will not suffer because they did their job. Someone in every agency has to be a Robert Kennedy. That's a difficult, perhaps impossible, role to play when you know that the bosses all the way up to the Oval Office want to go in a certain direction. There need not be any formal pressure, though Vice President Dick Cheney's frequent visits to the CIA certainly were pressure -- as were Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's instructions to his people to stay away from the CIA.

There was no pretense that the Bush administration was judiciously weighing the pros and cons of a war. Everyone knew the White House was looking for justification. Sure enough, they got it!

An administration needs inside its inner circle a dissenting voice, someone who insists repeatedly: ''You shouldn't do that!'' But in an administration that values loyalty as much as the present one does, that voice will not be heard. The president wanted ''regime change,'' and the CIA gave him reasons for it -- a "slam dunk," as CIA Director George Tenet called it.

Some Bush supporters are arguing that the Senate committee cleared Bush of deceiving the American people. Such a claim is nonsense. He may not have deliberately lied. Nonetheless, he passed on to the American people reasons for war that were weak. He may not have been aware that they were weak, but he should have been. The buck stops at his desk. To blame the loyal CIA for providing him inadequate information is to shrug the responsibility that comes with leadership. Britain's Tony Blair had the grace to assume responsibility. In the present White House, the president is never responsible for anything that goes wrong. Whether he deliberately deceived us does not matter. The fact is, he did deceive us. He should have known better.

[DinahMoeHum]

1. That oldie but goodie in discourse - Playing Devil's Advocate

which is sorely lacking in the current MIS-"administration".

A role which Bobby Kennedy played to a T.


:evilfrown:

[struggle4progress]

2. In response to calls for "intelligence reform," we will see ...

... various proposals that will actually INCREASE political control of "intelligence agencies" and further LIMIT the possibilities for dissenting analyses from these agencies. It is IMPORTANT to resist such proposals.

[Cocoa]

3. dissent is not tolerated in the Bu'ush Party

dissentors (i.e. traitors) are fed into a shredder.