Take a Hint From the Past

If history has taught us anything it should be that we need a strong CIA. During the Clinton administration the CIA was neutered not unlike what the Obama administration is doing today. The stretch between the end of the Cold War and the Sept. 11 attacks was supposed to be a shiny new era of globalized peace and prosperity, to which an intelligence service was considered quaintly irrelevant. Sound familiar?

The Clinton administration was basically uninterested in intelligence. Tenet (head of the CIA at that time) notes that the intelligence community lost 25 percent of its personnel in the 1990s and “tens of billions of dollars in investment compared with the 1990 baseline.” He implored the administration for funding increases in 1998 and 1999, but had to go “outside established channels to work with then-Speaker Gingrich to obtain a $1.2 billion budgetary supplemental.”

Who was in charge of the budget during those years in the White House? It’s a name that might be more familiar than you think: Leon Panetta, Current Obama appointee heading the CIA.

In the years of the Clinton administration, Panetta served as Clinton’s budget director and then Clinton’s chief of staff a year later. This means that the man responsible for hobbling the CIA's job of gathering intelligence in the years before Sept. 11 is the same man now being placed in charge of the agency. But just to make sure our intelligence was being placed in capable hands, Obama picked a man who has literally zero experience with intelligence or the bureaucracy surrounding it.

If that wasn't enough now Eric Holder, Obama's attorney general, has decided to investigate the conduct of the CIA while interrogating suspected terrorists. The whole organization is going to lawyer up and fear to use the means necessary to protect or country. They are being held accountable for interrogation techniques ordered by the previous administration and approved by the former attorney-general and his legal staff.The kicker is this was already hashed over by career prosecuting attorneys who decided there wasn't anything here of concern.

History has a habit of repeating itself. Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. These officials take an oath to protect our country from enemies foreign or domestic. I know I'd feel less concerned if our leaders focus was applied to matters actually demanded of them by the Constitution, not the expansion of powers they assume by putting a spin on the terminology. Failure to defend our country is an act of treason. You can paint this conduct with whatever brush you wish but should the outcome be as disastrous as Clinton's neutering of the CIA, I'd insist the whole left wing, secular movement be tried for dereliction of duty and treason. They need to be held accountable for this witch hunt!

God Bless
Capt. Bill