The events of the past week, beginning with Porter Goss' surprise announcement Friday that he would be resigning as head of the CIA after only 18 months on the job and leading to the President's nomination three days later of Gen. Michael Hayden as his replacement, has created an interesting debate here in Washington. Centering around the importance of civilian control of our country's intelligence agencies and the proper role of the military therein, the argument is over more than simply whether Gen. Hayden is qualified to run the Central Intelligence Agency once Goss departs, it's also over the issue of precedent -- both in the historical sense and whether we want to set a potentially dangerous new one here.

For the former question of Hayden's competence, clear answers are hard to find. He comes to the nomination a former head of the NSA (1999-2005) and the recent right-hand man to the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, whom he would have to work closely with at his post in the CIA. He has held senior intelligence positions both at the Pentagon and abroad, serving in South Korea, Bulgaria, and Germany, the latter of which he worked during the Yugoslav civil war. He has served on the first President Bush's National Security Council with Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice and is said to have recently fought against Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's continuous attempts to exert more control over intelligence gathering and analysis during his tenure at the NSA.

Yet as the linked Times article notes, he has "almost no direct experience at the C.I.A.'s central task of recruiting and running foreign agents," which would be a major problem for an agency, embattled as it is, whose recently stated goals were to increase the caliber and quantity of human intelligence in hot spots like North Korea and Iran, a deficiency made profoundly important by the situation in Iraq. (Had we known more or had better sources inside that country, would the justification leading up to that war or its execution shortly thereafter been altered, thus bettering the final outcome? Can we afford to continue stumbling in the dark in the other two areas, especially when the option of doing nothing for either no longer seems possible?)

Also cause for concern is Hayden's aforementioned proximity to Negroponte and their rumored disdain of the job Porter Goss was doing, which led to his eventual ouster. This closeness, coupled with their displeasure for Goss' resisting their proposed changes -- to remove most of the analysis components of the CIA and move them to the DIA, leaving the agency to focus strictly on intelligence collection -- eventually engineered the latter's exit, leading many to fear Hayden would blindly do the bidding of his former boss and merely add another layer of bureaucracy to an already muddled picture, further downgrading the importance of the agency at home and abroad.

Finally, the fact that Hayden's reign at the head of the NSA coincided with the creation and expansion of the recently revealed domestic wiretapping program -- the same one we found out on Friday had compiled a massive database of every phone call made by customers of three of the largest phone companies in America,  AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, since 9/11 -- is particularly alarming. The program, which has been decried by many as illegal since no warrants have been issued to justify the gathering of information, has allowed the NSA to spy on "tens of millions of domestic phone calls" and emails made by American citizens, according to reports, yet was still defended by Hayden in the press as late as February. To blindly approve the executor (and advocate) of a program whose constitutionality still has yet to be determined  -- or even discussed in front of Congress, for that matter -- seems extremely foolhardy, to say the least.

As I mentioned before, though, the issue at hand is not merely whether Hayden possesses the proper skillset and qualities to functionally do the job. Of primary importance, in my mind, is the matter of precedent -- what is the historic  justification for all of our major intelligence agencies to be run by former (or current, in this case, as Hayden has expressed a desire to remain on active duty) military officials? Contextually, the CIA has almost always been anomalous in this respect as all the other intel agencies -- the DIA, the NSA, the armed service branches' groups -- are run by current members of the military.

This makes sense when you consider where they fall on the government's flowchart -- all of the aforementioned organizations lie under the Department of Defense on the federal family tree and thus under its funding and command. The CIA, however, is an independent entity and has long had a history of civilian command. Of its 19 previous directors since its inception after WWII, only six have been former military commanders, the last being Adm. Stansfield Turner from 1977-81. Since that time, every director -- all seven of them -- has been a civilian without any military experience. (There were two deputy directors who briefly became acting directors --  Lt. Gen. Vernon A. Walters in 1973 and  Adm. William O. Studeman in 1993 and 1995, but these terms lasted a mere three months, two weeks, and four months, respectively.)

In fact, in the entire sixty-year history of the agency, only twelve of them -- including each of the first seven -- have been run by a military commander. Once the decision was made to lean towards civilian control of the agency with Gen. Bedell Smith's departure in 1953, there have been only two leaders with military experience for a total of five years --  Vice Adm. William F. Raborn, Jr., as well as Adm. Turner. The remainder of the directors came from a range of other professions and qualifications -- Director Schlesinger was an economist; Director H.W. Bush was an oilman and high-ranking Republican politician (and the first total outsider to be given the post); Director Casey was a political campaign director; Director Webster was a federal judge and head of the FBI. Even recent heads like Tenet and Goss came from non-military backgrounds -- Tenet was a deputy director in the CIA before being bumped to the top spot while Goss was a Florida Congressman.

To reverse this trend, and the bulk of this history, now is rather dangerous. The Pentagon and its intelligence agencies already control 80 percent of the resources devoted to intelligence gathering and analysis. The CIA, with its history of civilian leadership, has been seen as a check, albeit a small one, on the military-centric mindset and policies that prevail in the Department of Defense. When Jimmy Carter nominated Adm. Turner to the position in 1977, there was no public outcry over his doing so because the Democrats still controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, providing balance to the political equation. To forgo this ability now -- with a Republican president, a Republican Congress, and an increasingly right-leaning judiciary -- would seal off one more outlet of critical opinion and edge us perilously closer to a monolithic, homogenous government where all organs of dissent are silenced or eliminated.

In a time where the administration is already criticized for its unflinching rigidity and resistance to change, establishing this new precedent should give the general public and politicians alike serious pause. The question that needs to be asked is whether we really want one of the last vestiges of independent, civilian control in this government to disappear when so many of the others -- the Pentagon and the White House, to name two of the largest and most egregious offenders -- have swayed so severely towards aggressive militarism and narrow analysis.Do we want to essentially destroy the CIA and its main function of intelligence analysis and instead shred it to pieces, scattering the remnants across an already bloated bureaucracy and hope they are able to sufficiently reconnect to protect us from coming threats?

Thankfully it appears that members on both sides of the aisle in Capitol Hill are as concerned with this prospect as I am and are speaking out about the President doing so. Major Republican leaders voiced concerns about the appointment last weekend -- Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KA), Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), to name a few. (Hoekstra said, "Our nation needs to maintain a balance between intelligence support to the military and long-term intelligence support to policy makers. By placing a military officer atop the CIA we risk losing this balance.") -- indicating that the confirmation hearing may be more of a struggle than recent ones for Judges Roberts and Alito, for example.

If nothing else, it's a sign of hope that there will finally be a serious debate over something of importance here in Washington; that the system of checks and balances our founders sought fit to include in the Constitution won't be further washed away and relegated to uniform obscurity.

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One of the things you won't find in the Constitution is the subject of this first reader, an op-ed from the Times last week. Dealing with presidential signing statements, the article explains how despite five years in office with nary a veto -- the longest reign without doing so since Thomas Jefferson -- the President has issued over 750 of these decrees stating that he will not abide by the edicts of various laws. He's done so for laws regarding the torture of prisoners, for those regarding the spying on of Americans and those requiring notification by the Justice Department of how the FBI is implementing the Patriot Act to make searches and seizures. He's even done so for those protecting people in the nuclear industry who report illegal activities to Congress.

His response to these products of the people and our political system? Nuh uh. Not if I don't feel like it. In essence it's an unofficial veto, one that is conveniently not subject to examination or review by the Congress and whose mere existence is rarely even acknowledged in public. It's the iron stamp of the emperor, the emphatic assertion of the most powerful Nike spokesman in the world -- just do it.

And while this product of the Reagan era -- the concoction of one of his lawyers to expand the power of the executive -- may not be the invention of President Bush, he's definitely its biggest proponent.  Quoting from the Times article,

"Since the Reagan era, other presidents have issued signing statements to explain how they interpreted a law for the purpose of enforcing it, or to register narrow constitutional concerns. But none have done it as profligately as Mr. Bush. (His father issued about 232 in four years, and Bill Clinton 140 in eight years.) And none have used it so clearly to make the president the interpreter of a law's intent, instead of Congress, and the arbiter of constitutionality, instead of the courts. Like many of Mr. Bush's other imperial excesses, this one serves no legitimate purpose. Congress is run by a solid and iron-fisted Republican majority. And there is actually a system for the president to object to a law: he vetoes it, and Congress then has a chance to override the veto with a two-thirds majority.

That process was good enough for 42 other presidents. But it has the disadvantage of leaving the chief executive bound by his oath of office to abide by the result. This president seems determined not to play by any rules other than the ones of his own making. And that includes the Constitution."