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If recent years have proved anything, it is this: there are admirals; and then there are admirals.
Admirals in the mold of Stansfield Turner -- like William (Fox) Fallon and Joint Chiefs' Chairman Mike Mullen are one thing. They represent the tough independence that the Navy often requires of its senior officers.
Near the end of the Bush administration, Fallon and Mullen deserved most of the credit for facing down Vice President Dick Cheney and persuading President Bush that war with Iran would not be a good idea and that Israel needed to be told exactly that -- in no uncertain terms. That was just three years ago; war was pretty close.
Then there are the admirals who know how to salute and avoid confrontations, the likes of Mike McConnell, who was snatched away from his sinecure as a Booz-Allen & Hamilton marketeer to become the second director of national intelligence, apparently because he was judged to be incapable of doing much harm.
What McConnell lacked in managerial knowhow, well, let me put it this way; he in no way made up for that lack by his substantive acumen. Three poignant illustrative vignettes involving the hapless McConnell come to mind.
(1) Testifying before the Senate, McConnell was asked to venture a guess as to why Israel might put forward a more alarming view of Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon than that of the U.S. intelligence community. He was at a loss for an answer.
(2) At times McConnell would display his naà ¯vetà ©by saying too much. The subject of torture came up in an interview McConnell gave Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker magazine. McConnell innocently told Wright that, for him:
"Waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can't imagine how painful! Whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture."
Later, McConnell let slip the rationale for the Bush administration's refusal to admit that waterboarding is torture. For anyone paying attention, that rationale had long been a no-brainer. But here is McConnell inadvertently articulating it:
"If it is ever determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it."
(3) More damning was "Malleable Mike" McConnell's attempts to finesse the key judgments of the bombshell NIE of November 2007, which directly contradicted what Bush and Cheney had been saying about the imminence of a nuclear threat from Iran.
Facing withering criticism from the likes of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and the irrepressible former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, McConnell backpedaled.
In testimony to the Senate on Feb. 5, 2008, he confessed to careless wording in the NIE due to time constraints, and even indicated he "probably would have changed a thing or two."
Whereas the NIE started out with a straightforward, "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program," McConnell indicated he would now prefer to say, for example, that "maybe even the least significant portion [of the Iranian nuclear program; i. e., the warhead] was halted and there are other parts that continue."
A Mixed Bag
McConnell's successor Blair was in no way a strong manager as DNI. And with an increasingly bloated staff tripping over one another, there was little hope that Blair was up to the job of taking hold of the intelligence community.
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