WASHINGTON: Top US lawmakers expressed concern on Sunday over the nomination of Gen Michael Hayden as the next CIA chief, setting up a possible congressional showdown with the White House. Both Republican and opposition Democratic legislators voiced concern about putting a military officer in charge of the agency instead of a civilian, and cited Gen Hayden’s support for a controversial domestic spying program as a worry.
“Bottom line, I do believe he’s the wrong person, the wrong place, at the wrong time,” Representative Pete Hoekstra, a Republican who heads the House intelligence committee, told Fox News.
“We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time,” Mr Hoekstra said.
“The danger of having the military take over intelligence is that the military has a very different perspective on the world,” he said. “They’re worried about today and wars and threats to the United States in the short term and how we might respond militarily.”
Republican senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Gen Hayden could ease those concerns by resigning as an Air Force general and naming civilians as his deputies.
Still, Senator Roberts, who praised the general as an expert on intelligence, would not say whether he would vote for Gen Hayden’s nomination. His committee must endorse the nomination and send it to the full Senate for approval.
“I’m not in a position to say that I am for Gen Hayden and will vote for him,” he told CNN. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein expressed concern about military control of most intelligence matters.
“You can’t have the military, I think, control most of the major aspects of intelligence,” she told ABC television.
Lawmakers expect to grill Gen Hayden, now the principal deputy director of national intelligence, over the domestic eavesdropping program, which he oversaw during his time as director of the National Security Agency.
“I have some very pointed questions,” Republican Senator Arlen Specter, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Fox News. “I want to know what the program is. We cannot judge its constitutionality without knowing what the program is.”
Mr Goss was reportedly forced out due to disappointment over his leadership of the CIA.
He was appointed less than two years ago to reform an agency under fire over the Sept 11, 2001, attacks and pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
But Mr Goss upset the US spy establishment when he named some of his congressional allies to top jobs and used strong-arm tactics in a bid to reform the agency.
Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday praised Mr Goss as ‘a very able and talented public servant’ who took the CIA job at a difficult time and did a ‘reasonably good job’.
Mr Cheney, interviewed by NBC television while visiting Dubrovnik, Croatia, said the agency needed to change, emphasising its past errors in not detecting the Sept 11 plot and in not producing ‘quality intelligence’ on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the US invasion.
“We’ve built a whole system around technical collection that worked very well during the Cold War,” Mr Cheney said.
“But now when we’re faced with trying to find ways to figure out what a small group of terrorists are going to do, they’re difficult to penetrate, difficult to track by national technical means. It’s a whole different kind of a target.
“It places a much heavier emphasis on human intelligence than was required necessarily before. So there are big changes underway in the intelligence community,” he said. —AFP
