Q&A: Valerie Plame Wilson

Valerie Plame Wilson, former CIA officer, on why we need to stop outsourcing the CIA, fast.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Mother Jones: What is Bush’s legacy regarding intelligence?

Valerie Plame Wilson: The hardest thing to fix about President Bush’s legacy regarding the US intelligence community will be our ability to objectively assess threats to national security, which has been seriously compromised because of the creeping politicization of the entire intelligence apparatus. The increased politicization undermines our capability to provide unbiased and unvarnished intelligence to senior US policymakers, leads to policy judgments that are not sustained by the facts, and makes us even more vulnerable than we were on 9/11. Although the intelligence community has always been susceptible to the political vicissitudes of the moment, the abrupt and dramatic increase in this drift since 2000 has done serious damage to our collection and analytical capabilities.

Every American, no matter what his political inclination, wants to believe that the intelligence that lands on the president’s desk is completely devoid of ideological taint or political bias. The intelligence presented should be “just the facts.” Indeed, that is what most intelligence professionals pride themselves on—the ability to lay out the known facts, regardless of how they might be accepted.

Politicized intelligence undermines the national security mission, degrades morale, and ultimately cheats American citizens. From the unprecedented number of trips by Vice President Cheney and his then chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the war with Iraq to meet with analysts, to the leak of a covert operations officer’s identity to satisfy petty partisan aims, we are deep into a period of politically distorted intelligence.

The problems caused by politicization of our intelligence are significant. Some of the most disturbing trends are the current heavy reliance on contractors. It is estimated that some intelligence entities within the IC devote up to 70 percent of their resources to contractors. Allowing the private sector to be so heavily involved in the intelligence business is counterproductive for several reasons. First, it fosters an atmosphere of cronyism and patronage that is unhealthy in a functioning bureaucracy. Unbalanced reliance on contractors erodes institutional knowledge and quality. Also, there is the ideological question of how much of our national security collection functions we believe it is prudent to outsource? To whom are the contractors ultimately loyal—their government or their corporation? Our national security depends upon it.

Another problem is lack of meaningful congressional oversight. Both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have allowed themselves, like the rest of Congress, to approach their national security issues in a highly partisan manner and, at the same time, have abdicated their responsibility to provide oversight to the intelligence community.

And there’s the failure of Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) as currently written. This 1982 law clearly needs to be edited and tightened to ensure that any future intentional leak of a covert CIA operations officer’s identity can be fully and swiftly prosecuted.

MJ: Any easy fixes to the legacy that Bush has left for the intelligence community?

VPW: No. But the next administration can take a step in the right direction by placing people devoted to the rule of law, and who uphold the Constitution above all other allegiances, into positions of power and influence.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate