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Christian Science Monitor: CIA must shape up, gently
Reforms to the Central Intelligence Agency mandated by the Bush administration and congress have created more tension between the CIA and the White House than has existed in a quarter century, say many intelligence experts. New CIA director Porter Goss, a former Republican representative from Florida, has been accused of lacking finesse in his attempts to reorganize the agency. “If they want to make this thing work, they’ve got to convince these senior officials that change is a good thing and convince them to help,” says Arthur Hulnick, a CAS associate professor of international relations and a former CIA senior intelligence official, in the November 15 Christian Science Monitor. “But if they do it by wielding a broad sword, cutting off the heads of people who can help them, then it will fail.” Hulnick worked at the agency during the Carter administration when director Stansfield Turner was charged with reforming the spy program. “[Turner] brought staff in with him from the Navy, and didn’t listen to our advice,” Hulnick says. “We called it the Halloween massacre. He cut about 800 slots overseas. The rumor is of course that people got fired, but only 17 left the agency. Some retired, but most found other jobs in the agency.”
Denver Post: War on terror lacks vision
“The war against terrorism doesn’t start with corralling our allies in Berlin and Paris, or stop with finding bin Laden in Afghanistan,” writes Charles Stith, former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania and director of the African Presidential Archives and Research Center, in an op-ed piece in the November 7 Denver Post. Rather, “the central question in the war against fanaticism must be: what must we do to win over more countries to the virtue and value of our way of life? The short answer is that countries must experience a better way of life when they try democracy and free-market reform.” And to this end, Stith says, the United States must more actively support nations struggling to make democracy work, such as Kenya, Nigeria, Angola, and many others African countries. If John Kerry “had spent more time talking to the American people about this,” Stith argues, he “might have been able to give voters something to be for, instead of simply something to be against.”
Boston Globe: Dems need religion
“As anyone who has ever hugged an evangelical can tell you, red-state Americans are not confused about their economic interests,” Stephen Prothero, a CAS religion professor and department chairman, writes in a November 10 Boston Globe op-ed. “They are simply subordinating them to what they believe are more important matters.” Matters such as abortion, stem cell research, and gay marriage, that is. So Democrats as well need to speak in moral terms and “develop their own cultural politics — a politics that does not sneer at the deepest commitments of the vast majority of the American people. They need to get right with God. Religion and politics have never been utterly distinct in the United States. To insist otherwise is to cede ‘moral values,’ and the White House, to conservatives.”
19
November 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations