Should George W. Bush not be re-elected, there will be considerable speculation about where Sen. Bob Graham’s name will be on several John Kerry Administration short lists. That includes the CIA, where some think Graham could confer, in effect, footnote status upon Porter Goss — for having the shortest tenure of any CIA director.
For now, however, the outgoing, three-term Florida senator — and former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee — isn’t encouraging any such speculation. He dismissed such scenarios and told a recent luncheon crowd at the Tiger Bay Club of Tampa that he was more interested in enjoying his 11 grandchildren.
What he wasn’t reluctant to offer, though, were criticisms of America’s intelligence failures leading up to Sept. 11 and denunciations of subsequent Bush Administration missteps. The former were familiar assertions from his book, “Intelligence Matters.” The latter largely focused on the decision to go to war in Iraq — at the expense of flushing out Osama bin Laden. Some outtakes:
*”We’re no longer protected by oceans. We need anticipatory information. This is an enemy that was less known to us than the Soviets were in 1947. A tribe of tribes