[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 61 (Wednesday, May 17, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E859-E860]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




        NOMINATION OF GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN AS DIRECTOR OF THE CIA

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                           HON. TERRY EVERETT

                               of alabama

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, May 17, 2006

  Mr. EVERETT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of the nomination 
of Gen. Michael Hayden as the next Director of the Central Intelligence 
Agency. I have known Gen. Hayden for years and believe he is the most 
qualified candidate in the country for this critical position.
  To further illustrate this point, I would like to call your attention 
to a recent editorial by retired Gen. Charles Boyd that appeared in the 
Wall Street Journal on May 11 which makes a convincing case for the 
Hayden nomination.
  Mr. Speaker, Gen. Boyd served 35 years in the Air Force. As a combat 
pilot in Vietnam, he was shot down on his 105th mission and survived 
2,488 days as a prisoner of war. The only POW from that war to achieve 
the four-star rank, General Boyd's final military assignment was as 
deputy commander in chief of U.S. forces in Europe. Prior to this 
assignment, Gen. Boyd was the commander of Air University at Maxwell 
Air Force Base, in my congressional district.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to place in the 
Record a copy of Gen. Boyd's editorial.

              [From the Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2006]

                      A Hayden Symphony at the CIA

                          (By Charles G. Boyd)

       Our political disagreements are often obtuse for the simple 
     reason that it is difficult to discern motives. Do disputants 
     put the interests of the country ahead of partisan and 
     personal concerns? Moreover, disagreements about intelligence 
     issues are doubly hard to parse, since--despite leaks and 
     rampant gossip--most of what goes on inside the Central 
     Intelligence Agency remains opaque even to high-paid 
     journalists and other Washington sophisticates. And so, amid 
     partisan positioning and an imposing ignorance, is the scene 
     set for the already dismaying dispute over the president's 
     nomination of Michael Hayden to be CIA director.
       The arguments (to use a generous term) being made against 
     Gen. Hayden are so without merit or even serious content that 
     one cannot help but suspect partisan stratagems at work. Of 
     these, three are most common.

[[Page E860]]

       First, the contention that Michael Hayden is a kind of 
     intelligence technocrat, knowledgeable only in signal 
     intelligence, is pure canard. A liberal-arts man, Gen. Hayden 
     has a masters degree in history, and was the broad-based 
     senior intelligence official for the Air Force and the U.S. 
     European Command before entering the technical domain of the 
     National Security Agency. He worked on the National Security 
     Council staff, in the U.N. Command and U.S. Forces Korea, and 
     in these positions was a senior level consumer of 
     intelligence as well as an earlier producer of it. Those who 
     make such accusations do not know him or, more broadly, what 
     they are talking about.
       Some complain, secondly, that Gen. Hayden was somehow 
     complicit in the domestic eavesdropping undertaken by the NSA 
     at the president's direction. Gen. Hayden's sin in this case 
     seems to stem from his calm and rational defense of an 
     embattled president's heretofore secret program. No legal 
     infractions attended anyone's behavior in what was, and 
     remains, a policy response to a clear and present threat. 
     Moreover, if Gen. Hayden had objected--having been assured by 
     the attorney general, the Department of Justice, the White 
     House counsel and the NSA general counsel that the program 
     was legal--his position would have been unprofessional and 
     ill-advised.
       Third, there is the objection that Gen. Hayden is, well, a 
     general--a military man--as if that automatically 
     disqualifies him for the job. Since the National Security Act 
     of 1947 created the CIA, four military officers have held the 
     director's job--plus two more who directed the postwar 
     predecessor to the CIA. So there is ample precedent for Gen. 
     Hayden's nomination. But the complaint here is not so much 
     about precedent as the presumption that Gen. Hayden would 
     docilely do the bidding of the bureaucratic imperium 
     represented by the present secretary of defense. To 
     believe this is to ignore his professional history.
       Gen. Hayden was the only high-ranking active-duty general 
     to testify against Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's desires as the 
     National Intelligence Directorate was debated by Congress in 
     2004. He did so, he believed, in the interests of a more 
     rational template for oversight, and control of those 
     intelligence agencies now under the Defense Department whose 
     customers are multidepartmental. Gen. Hayden was a man of 
     convictions with the courage to defend them when he was a 
     lieutenant colonel, and has lost neither of those 
     characteristics as he ascended into the senior ranks of his 
     profession.
       Most important, the best guarantee against coercion of the 
     CIA director by any cabinet-level official--or president--may 
     be stated in one word: professionalism. And Michael Hayden, 
     as I have observed for nearly 20 years, is a professional par 
     excellence.
       Those who wish to harm the president seem intent on using 
     Gen. Hayden as a bank shot into the Oval Office. This is a 
     great shame, and stands to be an important missed 
     opportunity, for the confirmation process--were it to focus 
     truly on the national interest--could do a great deal of good 
     at this time of tumult in the intelligence community.
       There has been, for a long time, a tendency on the part of 
     some presidents to select CIA directors who were amateurs in 
     the craft. Their political or ideological leanings have 
     sometimes been a more important factor in their appointment 
     than their knowledge and capabilities in the arcane world of 
     intelligence. With those chosen for such reasons comes a 
     weakened ability to resist pressure to marshal intelligence 
     in ways tailored to support the policy objectives of a 
     president: pressure to give the president what he wants 
     rather than what he needs. It is fair, I believe, to claim 
     that the intelligence failures of recent years were a long 
     time in the making, and that they were failures not so much 
     of the institution but of a flawed intelligence leadership 
     selection process.
       ``Amateur'' is not, by definition, a swear word; we have 
     had, on occasion, some very talented non-professional 
     directors of Central Intelligence. But there is no substitute 
     for the professional knowledge and ethos at the top that 
     legitimate and protect the intelligence function from a host 
     of political pressures and insinuations.
       Gen. Hayden's confirmation hearings should, first of all, 
     result in his confirmation. But beyond that, the hearings 
     could do the country an important service if they were to 
     consider a more thoroughgoing reform--modeling the key 
     intelligence positions in the U.S. government on that of the 
     chairman of the Federal Reserve, or of the Joint Chiefs, 
     whose term does not run parallel to that of the president, 
     and whose professional credentials are critical elements in 
     his selection. More than anything else the Congress can do, 
     such a reform would help restore the professionalism that is 
     crucial to the intelligence function in a democracy. That 
     would be no bank shot, but a slam-dunk for national security.

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