USA Today recently reported that the CIA has seen a boost in its minority hiring in the last few years. Ordinarily this might be great news, however, the Agency may not be recruiting the “right type” of minorities to come down to their Farm for training:

More than one in four recruits offered jobs as undercover spies by the CIA this year are members of racial or ethnic minorities — a record high percentage, the agency’s top spy says.

But the CIA continues to lag in fielding spies from the Middle Eastern and South Asian backgrounds deemed most critical to the war on terrorism, said Jose Rodriguez, the outgoing director of clandestine intelligence gathering, in an interview with USA TODAY. Only about 5% of the agency’s current undercover spy force is from an Asian background. [Link]

I know plenty of South Asian Americans who would be a perfect fit at the CIA. Almost all of these folks would say “no way” to the idea, however. The problem is glaringly obvious. How is the CIA supposed to recruit from a pool of much needed, patriotic South Asian Americans (or anyone else for that matter) when that pool of recruits is worried that they will be asked to de-humanize (potentially innocent) suspects by order of the Executive Branch. From today’s NYTimes:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures. [Link]

I would think that the agents best suited to infiltrate Al Qaeda’s network are those that would have the most (or could best exhibit) sympathy for the myriad of underlings and middle-men near the bottom of a terrorist group’s hierarchy. These potential agents would not take a job that would require breaking innocent lives, lives they could possibly relate to, in order to satisfy the whims of chicken hawks and neocons. If the CIA continues to be associated with extraordinary rendition and torture, its going to keep hurting their recruiting efforts, not to mention “The War on Terror.”

CIA critic Tim Roemer, a former Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee who sat on the 9/11 Commission, said Rodriguez’s comments show the CIA has “more work to do,” especially in recruiting speakers of Middle Eastern and South Asian languages. “Our target has radically changed,” said Roemer, president of the Center for National Policy, a Washington group that researches intelligence issues. “We need people who can tell us the potential threat posed by four guys in a cave in Afghanistan…” [Link]