{"id":177311,"date":"2021-01-18T12:01:10","date_gmt":"2021-01-18T12:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=177311"},"modified":"2021-01-17T03:57:15","modified_gmt":"2021-01-17T03:57:15","slug":"bidens-nominee-for-cia-director","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/01\/bidens-nominee-for-cia-director\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden\u2019s Nominee for CIA Director"},"content":{"rendered":"

If there must be a CIA, I feel better with Bill Burns being in charge of it.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

William Burns in 2014 as U.S. deputy secretary of state.
(State Department)<\/p><\/div>\n

11 Jan 2021 –<\/em> President-elect Joe Biden has finally named a new CIA director, one of the final senior-level appointees for his new administration.\u00a0 Much to the surprise of many of us who follow these things, he named senior diplomat Williams Burns to the position.\u00a0 Burns is one of the most highly-respected senior U.S. diplomats of the past three decades.\u00a0 He has ably served presidents of both parties and is known as both a reformer and as a supporter of human rights.<\/p>\n

Burns is currently the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an important Washington-based international affairs think tank.\u00a0 He served as deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama and was ambassador to Russia under President George W. Bush and ambassador to Jordan under President Bill Clinton.\u00a0 He was instrumental in the negotiations that led to the Iran Nuclear Deal and spent much of his career focused on the Middle East Peace Process.\u00a0 Burns joined the Foreign Service in 1982.<\/p>\n

When he made the announcement<\/a> of Burns\u2019 appointment, Biden said,<\/p>\n

\u201cBill Burns is an exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the word stage keeping our people and our country safe and secure.\u00a0 He shares my profound belief that intelligence must be apolitical and that the dedicated intelligence professionals serving our nation deserve our gratitude and respect.\u00a0 The American people will sleep soundly with him as our next CIA Director.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The message from Biden is clear:\u00a0 The CIA will not be led by a political hack like Mike Pompeo, a CIA insider like John Brennan, or someone associated with the CIA\u2019s crimes of torture, secret prisons, or international renditions like Gina Haspel.\u00a0 Instead, the organization will be led by someone with experience engaging across a negotiating table with America\u2019s enemies, someone experienced in solving problems, rather than creating new ones, someone who has dedicated much of his career to promoting peace, rather than to creating war.<\/p>\n

Rank & File Response <\/strong><\/p>\n

The question, though, is what will be the response from the CIA\u2019s rank-and-file to Burns\u2019 appointment?\u00a0 I can tell you from my 15 years of experience at the CIA that there will be two reactions.\u00a0 At the working level, analysts, operators, and others will continue their same level of work no matter who the director is.\u00a0 Most working level officers don\u2019t even care who the director is.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t matter to them.\u00a0 They never encounter the director and policies made at that top level generally don\u2019t impact them on a day-to-day basis.<\/p>\n

At the senior levels, the leadership levels, CIA officers will be of two minds.\u00a0 Some will welcome Burns and his professionalism.\u00a0 They\u2019ll welcome a director who doesn\u2019t attract adverse press because of a past history of committing war crimes or crimes against humanity.\u00a0 (Even if they supported those crimes when they were being committed, press attention is always unwelcome.)\u00a0 They\u2019ll welcome a director who didn\u2019t<\/em> head secret prisons overseas.\u00a0 They\u2019ll welcome a director who wasn\u2019t<\/em> in charge of Guantanamo.\u00a0 They\u2019ll welcome a director who wasn\u2019t<\/em> in charge of maintaining a secret \u201ckill list.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others will resent Burns, though, as they resented an earlier outsider, Admiral Stansfield Turner.\u00a0 Turner had been appointed by President Jimmy Carter to \u201cclean up\u201d the CIA.\u00a0 Turner then fired fully a third of the CIA\u2019s operations officers, some just months away from qualifying for retirement.\u00a0 He was universally reviled after that, and he never regained the trust of agency personnel.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not Burns\u2019 style.\u00a0 He\u2019s not a military officer who demands fealty.\u00a0 He\u2019s a diplomat, a negotiator.\u00a0 The CIA has to be cleaned up.\u00a0 Its policies have to be reformed.\u00a0 If there must be a CIA, I feel better with Bill Burns being in charge of it.\u00a0 At the very least, we should give him enough time to at least get started.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act\u2014a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration\u2019s torture program.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 Jan 2021 – If there must be a CIA, I feel better with Bill Burns being in charge of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":177312,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,2197,133,70],"class_list":["post-177311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-biden","tag-cia","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}