E-Mail This Article to a Friend Cover-up in the works How the appointment of Porter Goss to the CIA makes the world safe for George W. Bush

WITH THE NOMINATION of Republican congressman and White House errand boy Porter Goss of Florida as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency, President George W. Bush has mocked the spirit and industry of the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, which called for major reform in the CIA and national-security establishment in the wake of the failures that led to 9/11.

The Goss nomination serves Bush’s narrow and personal political interests, not the nation’s needs.

That comes as no surprise.

Bush, with still-inexplicable high-handedness, squandered a rare moment of international political acquiescence in — if not outright approval for — waging war on the Afghan-based Al Qaeda, with his reckless and ill-conceived invasion of Iraq. He then marshaled domestic support for that invasion by misleading Congress and hoodwinking the public into believing that the repressive and repulsive Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction that threatened international stability. He further claimed that the Iraqi dictator was fast developing the nuclear capability to threaten American lives at home.

To protect this web of deceit, Bush needs a stooge at the head of the CIA. To say that Goss will be a White House stooge, however, is not to suggest that the man is stupid.

To best understand what’s going on, it helps to realize that the designated fall guy for so many of the Bush administration’s international sins, both of omission and commission, will be former CIA director George Tenet. A devoted Bush lap dog, Tenet was nonetheless a holdover from the Clinton administration, which is still considered sordid and suspect by the Bushies. As such, he is eminently sacrificial.

No less an avenging angel than Bob Woodward of the Washington Post produced the smoking gun that incriminated Tenet — and will again — when he reported in his breathless account of the run-up to the Iraq war, Plan of Attack, that Tenet assured Bush that the WMD case against Saddam was a "slam-dunk."

Bush, according to Woodward, was sagaciously skeptical. Never mind that Bush — and Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — had long before decided to pull the trigger on Saddam.

Tenet, in his eagerness to please, dug his own grave. Goss will be the shovel Bush & Co. use to fill it in.

Goss had a career in espionage and military intelligence before he was elected to Congress. During his tenure in Washington, he has chaired the committee charged with overseeing intelligence operations. These credentials, according to Bush, qualify Goss for the CIA post. Perhaps under other circumstances he might be. But the fact that the intelligence misfires at the CIA and the FBI occurred while Goss, among others, was on watch should by itself preclude his service.

But Goss’s strongest credential, his single most important qualification, is that he has been publicly critical of Tenet.

Here’s why that’s crucial to Bush:

At the moment, a flip of the coin could determine if the Senate, which must approve the Goss appointment, will hold full hearings and a vote before the November election. The threat of a filibuster might slow down the process. But public sentiment for action will be strong.

If the Senate does act, Bush will paint Goss’s opponents as obstructionists, bent on subverting presidential initiative. That will be hot metal for Bush critics to handle.

If Bush loses, most of the issues on the table will disappear — at least until historians excavate the record long in the future. John Kerry, not Bush, will become the focus.

But if Bush wins, his troubles begin in earnest in a very different way. The seeds for scandals that destroy, compromise, or cripple presidents (Watergate and Richard Nixon, Iran-contra and Ronald Reagan, Whitewater-Lewinsky and Bill Clinton) are sown during the first four years of an administration, but sprout their bitter fruit during congressional investigations that follow during the second term.

As both a candidate for CIA chief and as head of the agency, Goss will make sure that Tenet continues to take the fall for Bush.

(There are some shorter-term political fringe benefits as well. The fact that his new CIA chief comes from the swing state of Florida does Bush no harm and much potential good with the supporters of the relatively popular Goss.)

There is about all this, to borrow a phrase from William James, a "perfect rottenness."

And it is a rottenness that carries the whiff of White House political adviser Karl Rove’s dark artistry. If the stakes were not so high we’d be tempted to dismiss this as Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy, a madcap adventure out of Mad magazine.

But it’s not. Osama bin Laden is still at large. Men and women — our sons and daughters, our friends and relatives — continue to die in Iraq, as do even greater numbers of Iraqi innocents. The economic price of this adventure will soon begin catching up with taxpayers. And our liberties are more compromised every day.

The Goss CIA appointment is designed to do one thing: protect George W. Bush and his cronies. The rest of the country can go to hell.

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