It appears the Female Imperative now takes precedence over national security:
For the past eight months, there has
been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House,
the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a
means of identifying characters in the devastating report
it released last week on the C.I.A.’s abusive interrogation and
detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now
we know one reason why.The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story
revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of
high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does
not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible
judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs
through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was
given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks;
she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she
misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an
absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely
told congressional overseers that the torture worked.Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for
the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional
studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church
Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a
painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in
order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable.
Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to
NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former
intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on
background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many
intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail
for what she has done.”Instead, however, she has
been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently
working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch,
she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was
also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)
This is an example of another reason not to permit women in the military. Women are not considered to be fully accountable in modern American society, and soldiers who are unaccountable to civilian leadership are not desirable in anything that still pretends to be a free society.