CIA Run Amok

NRO Online ^ | May 8, 2006 | The Editors

[Moose Dung]

The reasons for Porter Goss’s abrupt departure as CIA director are shrouded in mystery. But its effect is not. It gives the impression that there has been a coup by the CIA insiders who have waged a covert policy war against the Bush administration for five years. The White House must act quickly to correct the impression that the renegades have won.

The CIA is supposed to work for the president. It was created in 1948 to be the president’s civilian, non-partisan, non-policy intelligence arm. Its job is to provide an accurate picture of facts and trends so that decision makers can formulate good policy. Too often the agency has performed that job miserably, the greatest example being its gargantuan miscalculations about the Soviet Union. In retrospect, this is perhaps unsurprising. The CIA has always had a leftist bent, well represented in its upper echelons even under directors of staunchly anti-Communist and pro-national-security orientation.

During the Bush presidency, however, the agency has not been content with subtly pushing its own agenda while underperforming its nominal mission. It has run amok. In fact, it worked assiduously—though unsuccessfully—to depose the administration in the 2004 election, and since then has continued brazenly undermining Bush’s foreign policy.

[Moose Dung]

Editors of National Review say Purge the CIA.

[Perdogg]

There about five years too late. Better late than never.

[in hoc signo vinces]

Which is what is happening IMHO.

[eureka!]

Oh, the purge has only just begun: http://macsmind.blogspot.com/

[anymouse]

Shutter the place.

Let the other Intelligence Agencies sort out who is compromised and who is worth keeping. Anyone above a field agent or analyst should be suspect. Assume that all management level staff are compromised until demonstrated otherwise.

After 9/11 the "Agency," as they referred to themselves, contacted me to become one of them. I was flattered, but after hearing how management treated the working agents and knowing it was infested with liberals at odds with its purported mission, I declined. I'm glad I did.

[hermgem]

An agency of moles, with direct wires to the NYT and WP.
Spy finks are getting satisfaction, people suffer, Dem's start to hold hearings with updated input from these high paid moles.
Fitz gets leak feeds from left behind Valerie cohorts.
Uproot these cliques.

[Moose Dung]

I agree, the CIA certainly seems a redundant burocracy that can't do its job. Close the place down, they are not adding any value and sucking up resources that could be used productively elsewhere.

dung.

[Flatus I. Maximus]

The CIA is supposed to work for the president.

This rates a, "Well, duh." The CIA was created by a Democratic president, Harry Truman, to exert Democratic Party political control over military intelligence agencies that had decided the Democratic Party in general and the Roosevelt-Truman White House in particular was too infested with American leftists and paid Soviet agents to be trusted with important matters of national security.

The CIA upper management has always been an arm of the Democratic Party. Why do you think Reagan had to run aid to the Contras through an ad hoc private operation? No Republican president in the last 60 years has been able to trust the CIA.

[Suzy Quzy]

COUP-PLOTTERS....ALL of them!!!! HAng Em HIGH!!! Wilson/Plames, McCarthy, Clintons, Kerrys, Clarke, Clark, Zinni, Priest, Goodfellow, ETC....ETC....ETC!!! All CABALISTS!!!!!

[Suzy Quzy]

NIA needs you!!

[Suzy Quzy]

!!!!!!!!!

[bnelson44]

What is your take on the current resignation and nomination?

[GOP_1900AD]

At this point, maybe it would be best to sh#$ can it and start over.

[Right_in_Virginia]

BTTT

[ex-Texan]

The NY Daily News published a detailed report of an alleged scandal. MSM are ignoring the report. Report is posted here for those that may be interested.

[ex-snook]

The CIA analysts who 'duped' Clinton into bombing an aspirin factory continued to 'dupe' Bush on a rosey Iraq. If Clinton didn't oust them and Bush didn't oust them, they are a protected class with a Presidential seal of approval. They cook to order.

[SkyPilot]

Most damaging of all, however, has been the CIA’s incorrigible leaking. Again and again, it has demonstrated that it is more dedicated to harming the Bush administration’s war effort than to protecting its own secret activities. On the eve of the 2004 presidential debates, for example, the CIA selectively leaked a report claiming that it had warned in early 2003 that a joint Baathist-jihadist insurgency would follow a U.S. invasion of Iraq. The report—which turned out not to have said much of anything about an insurgency, and to have been wrong in its core prognostications—was written by Paul Pillar, who has been happy to rip the Bush administration in the press, identifying himself as “a top national intelligence officer.”

In May 2005, CIA officials leaked to the Washington Post details of a covert operation in which airplanes owned by CIA front companies were being used for various activities, including the renditions of top al Qaeda operatives. Six months later the Post, again relying on agency insiders (among others), reported that the CIA was using secret prisons in Eastern Europe to detain and interrogate high-level al Qaeda prisoners. This leak gravely jeopardized the cooperation of allied governments, whose own security and intelligence gathering were imperiled by the disclosure. On the eve of a critical congressional vote on Patriot Act renewal, the New York Times sensationally broke a story it had been sitting on for a year: According to intelligence-community sources (which almost certainly included CIA officials), the NSA had, since 9/11, been intercepting international communications between suspected al Qaeda terrorists and persons stationed inside the United States. Aside from delaying the Patriot Act’s extension for months, the NSA leak has taught the enemy about our methods and submerged a vital program—an effort to create an early-warning system to avoid another 9/11—in a sea of legal controversy.

At first, I was against putting a military man in charge of the CIA. But after re-reading this, I believe it is the right move.

Let the General take charge, kick a$$, and put some of these traitors out on their ear.