Porter Goss and Meetings

From the Washington Post (registration required) and the WMD Mailbag:

The daily 5 o'clock meeting at CIA headquarters that for the past three years has coordinated tactical counterterrorism operations involving senior CIA, FBI, Pentagon and Homeland Security Department officials has been cut back by new CIA Director Porter J. Goss to three a week, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The sessions were initiated by former CIA director George J. Tenet because of the failures of coordination among intelligence agencies before Sept. 11, 2001. He used the sessions to push the agencies to carry out specific activities, whether at home or abroad. The meetings were continued by Tenet's former deputy, John E. McLaughlin, while he was acting director and initially by Goss.

Recently, however, Goss, a former House member and onetime CIA case officer, created "a different format," according to an administration official familiar with the program. Goss instead chairs a somewhat similar meeting with a smaller group of senior officials from the agencies, who brief him three mornings a week, the official said.

Oh, that EVIL Bush administration. Now they're cutting (gasp) MEETINGS!

Here is the real beef of the story:

A former senior intelligence official said he believes Goss's sessions "lose the immediacy" of the Tenet's daily sessions. Meanwhile, the FBI and Pentagon are "beginning to eat into former CIA areas" as they carry out more of their own operations, he added.

Another major change is the result of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), created in August under a presidential executive order. It became operational Dec. 6. The center has absorbed personnel from the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), the CIA counterterrorism center and the FBI's counterterrorism center, making it the central agency for gathering and analyzing foreign and domestic terrorism intelligence and delivering it to the president, policymakers and others.

The NCTC, for example, now prepares the daily terrorist threat matrix, previously done by TTIC, which has been a major part of the terrorism section of the daily morning intelligence briefing given President Bush. Analysts from the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, Defense and other agencies work together as part of the NCTC in a building in Tysons Corner, putting together the matrix from the domestic and foreign threat information that pours into the center.

This is about agency turf wars. Nothing more. Nothing less. Same crap. Different day. Those who buy this load of hooey as some sort of harbinger of failure are dupes. This is about power: who had it; who has it; and who will get it.

Islamofascism Delenda Est!