We are very proud to announce that faculty member Caryn Wagner has been nominated by President Obama to be the Under Secretary for Intelligence & Analysis, Department of Homeland Security.
“President Obama Announces More Key Administration Posts,” White House press release (10/23/2009)
“Obama Administration to Release Detainee Abuse Photos; Former CIA Official Says Former Colleagues ‘Don’t Believe They Have Cover Anymore,’” ABC News.com (April 24, 2009 10:23 AM)
Calling the ACLU push to release the photographs “prurient” and “reprehensible,” Dr. Mark M. Lowenthal, former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production, tells ABC News that the Obama administration should have taken the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
“They should have fought it all the way; if they lost, they lost,” Lowenthal said. “There’s nothing to be gained from it. There’s no substantive reason why those photos have to be released.”
Lowenthal said the president’s moves in the last week have left many in the CIA dispirited, based on “the undercurrent I’ve been getting from colleagues still in the building, or colleagues who have left not that long ago.”
“We ask these people to do extremely dangerous things, things they’ve been ordered to do by legal authorities, with the understanding that they will get top cover if something goes wrong,” Lowenthal says. “They don’t believe they have that cover anymore.” Releasing the photographs “will make it much worse,” he said.
Even though President Obama has announced that the Justice Department will not prosecute CIA officers who were operating within the four corners of what they’d been told was the law, Lowenthal says members of the CIA are worried. “They feel exposed already, and this is going to increase drumbeat for an investigation or a commission” to explore detainee treatment during the Bush years, he said. “It’s going to make it much harder to resist, and they fear they’re then going to be thrown over.”
…
Lowenthal said his former colleagues at the CIA were “put off” by President Obama’s trip to the CIA earlier this week. “I don’t think the president’s speech went down very well, particularly the part when he said they made mistakes. They don’t think they made mistakes. They think they acted to execute policy. And those in the intelligence service don’t make policy.”
“Spy-Agency Revision Triggers Turf War,” by Siobhan Gorman, Wall Street Journal (5/12/2008)
“It’s about power, and while everybody wants to do this for the good of their system, nobody wants to totally give up power to do it,” said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior manager for the director of central intelligence, the post that preceded the new intelligence director.
“Intel: Lost In The Reshuffle,” by Tim Starks, Congressional Quarterly (5/5/2008)
Can anything be done? Some experts hope that those running the spy agencies will work things out for themselves. National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell, a retired Navy admiral, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have known each other for years, share a vision of national security and have been working together to improve cooperation among agencies. Their relationship, which Mark M. Lowenthal, one of the country’s foremost authorities on intelligence, calls a “golden age,” might set a pattern that would last into a new administration.
But Lowenthal, who now runs an intelligence education and consulting business, says the 2004 law has not created “significant improvements” in American spying performance.
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