Former CIA acting director Mike Morell. (photo: AP)
Mike
Morell, a Very Dangerous Resume on Hillary Clinton's Desk
By John Kiriakou, Reader
Supported News
07 September 16
Former
CIA acting director Mike Morell can’t help himself Just days after saying in
a New York Times op-ed that
he was endorsing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Morell went
on the Charlie Rose Show, detached himself from reality,
and told his host that he would recommend to the “new president” that she
should authorize war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria.
Morell
said specifically that if he were CIA director, he would advise Clinton to
begin surreptitiously killing Russian and Iranian soldiers in Syria, despite
the fact that these soldiers have been invited into Syria by that country’s
internationally-recognized government. Morell said further that he would advise
the president to begin bombing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s presidential
guard and his personal helicopters and planes. Remember, there has been no U.S.
declaration of war against Syria.
I know
Mike Morell personally. I worked with him in a variety of capacities at the
CIA. Morell is very intelligent. Beyond that, he’s a political animal and a
survivor. Morell is very introverted, which is not unusual for a career
analyst. But his introversion is disarming. Behind that quiet façade is a
schemer, a manipulator, and, I believe, a sociopath.
Over
the course of his career, Morell held virtually every senior job that a CIA officer could
hold. He had served as the head of the President’s Daily Brief, and he was
President George W. Bush’s personal briefer. Indeed, Morell was with Bush on
the morning of September 11, 2001, when Bush received the news of that
morning’s terrorist attacks.
Morell
also has served as the deputy executive director of the CIA, as the CIA’s first
associate deputy director, and then as deputy director for intelligence, in
charge of all CIA analysis. He later became CIA deputy director and twice was
acting director after the departures of Leon Panetta and David Petraeus.
He was
involved in the Never Trump movement before endorsing Clinton this summer.
Morell
certainly has the credentials to be CIA director or director of national
intelligence. But he is exactly the kind of person from whom the Democratic
nominee for president should be running. Morell simply doesn’t have the sense
of independence necessary for the job.
When I
was hired into the CIA’s analytic arm in early 1990, I was taught that the
golden rule of analysis was that it had to be utterly independent of policy. A
CIA analyst could never recommend a policy to the White House, to the
Departments of State and Defense, or to any other consumer of intelligence. But
on Morell’s watch, CIA analysts were mandated to offer policy proposals. This
defeats completely the notion of independence of CIA analysis. Morell had
changed the CIA Directorate of Intelligence’s raison d’être. That’s
inexcusable.
At the
same time, Morell assumed the tough guy role when he advised President Obama on
the Osama bin Laden killing. He seems to like the taste of blood, because now
he’s advocating illegal force against an internationally recognized chief of
state without any legal basis to do so.
There
are a lot of good, qualified people whom Hillary Clinton should consider as CIA
director – people who understand that the CIA should not in any way affect
policy. Mike Morell shouldn’t be one of them.
John
Kiriakou is an associate fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies. He is a
former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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