CIA head must do good work and prove his impartiality

Porter Goss, the new director of the CIA will face enormous challenges, not the least of which is a need to prove that he is able to divorce himself from the partisan politics that has dominated career.
Goss, who was sworn in Friday, will have to reorganize an intelligence community that has been criticized for not sharing information that might have allowed one or more of the nation's police or intelligence agencies stop the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide attacks on the United States from happening.
In testimony during his confirmation hearings, Goss pledged to improve information sharing, both across the federal government and with state and local governments.
Unless and until Congress acts to create a new national intelligence director, Goss, as CIA director, assumes the role as head of a loose confederation of 14 other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community.
It is a job that demands a nonpartisan approach. Each of those 14 agencies must feel free to tell the director things he may not want to hear, and it is the responsibility of the director to pass important information along to the president, again free of political baggage.
Background
Since 1989, Goss has represented southwest Florida in the House, an has served for nearly eight years as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. That makes him a somewhat strange selection for his new job, since it could be argued that one of his House responsibilities was to see that the national intelligence network functioned as a well-oiled machine, not as a dysfunctional family in which one member withheld information from the others out of fear or jealousy.
Goss is only the second congressman to lead the CIA The first was former president and House member George H.W. Bush.
Goss has impressive credentials. He was a CIA and Army intelligence officer during the 1960s. He was an aggressive member of the joint panel that in 2002 investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, and he is credited by many on the panel as having persuaded the CIA to declassify more of the 700-plus page report than it wanted.
But under his chairmanship, the House intelligence committee completed fewer major investigations of the CIA's performance than its counterpart panel in the Senate. Goss's committee did not investigate the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad or the faulty prewar intelligence analysis of Iraq.
That is the type of record he is going to have to overcome as head of the CIA.