SABOTAGE: Rowan Scarborough Talks About his New CIA Book

RS: Well, about three years ago John McCain became probably the first politician who declared the CIA a 'rogue agency.' And it is because inside the CIA, the bureaucracy at Langley had a priority of leaking and stopping Bush administration programs, rather than following the policy directives of the White House. And we’ve seen that in countless leaks about terrorist surveillance programs, the prisons where they were trying to interrogate top-ranking al Qaeda prisoners, in station reports from Baghdad. When Porter Goss took over the CIA in 2004, really trying to reform it, what happened? He died by a million leaks. It was a cut every day, until Porter Goss by 2006 actually was forced out.

JB: The picture you paint of the CIA is that it’s pretty much like a liberal college campus. Is that an apt analogy?

The best thing for the CIA is to be completely dismantled, all personnel drafted into the various military branches to answer to their appropriate and equivalent superiors.

Weekly polygraph examinations to ascertain if they are keeping their yaps shut, and if not?

Line ‘em up against the wall and ‘Pop Goes The Weasel’.

From the published investigations it appears CIA managers become wedded to notions and ignore evidence that doesn't fit. Saddam, secular + Osama, religious fanatic = no corroboration. They clung to this in the face of published news reports and internal evidence. Given that the U.S. and the U.K. partnered with Russia in WWII it doesn't take a PHD to figure out Saddam would support terrorists regardless of their beliefs. Seeing Shia Iran and Sunni Syria cooperate against us is another example. Yes, you need highly-trained, extremely intelligent people to overlook things that obvious.

What needs to happen is for the CIA, NSA & FBI to be turned into training commands. They can offer services like fingerprint analysis, domestic surveillance, overseas surveillance, asassination, eavesdropping, hacking, etc. Then various joint commands responsible for threat areas, such as the southern border, the northern border, homegrown terrorism, etc. would draw on these services as needed to address their threat areas. This would get the CIA management out of the policy arena altogether. How much demand do you think there would be for CIA analysis capabilities?

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